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WORDS; 

THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


BT 



WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D., 


AUTHOR OF “GETTING ON IN THE WORLD,’’ “ORATORY AND ORATORS,” 

ETC., ETC. 


Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende Gedanke 
und beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe.— Becker. 

n S' 



NEW EDITION FROM NEW PLATES. REVISED AND GREATLY ENLARGED. 


CHICAGO: 

S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 

1884 . 







Copyright, 1876, 

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 


Copyright, 1884, 

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY. 



KNIGHT a LE0HARD 

'Vov^'py 






Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead 
sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to 
speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.— Max Muller. 

A winged word hath struck ineradically in a million hearts, and enven¬ 
omed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath 
hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been 
willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future 
happiness.— W. S. Landor. 

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, 
produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. — Byron. 

A dead language is full of all monumental remembrances of the people who 
spoke it. Their swords and their shields are in it; their faces are pictured 
on its walls; and their very voices ring still through its recesses.—B. W. 
Dwight. 

Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph. . . If Milton had 
endorsed a bill of exchange with half-a-dozen blank-verse lines, it would be 
i.s good as his name, and would be accepted as good evidence in court.— 
Alexander Smith. 

If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make melody 
with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself, what is it? 
Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at best make money 
by railways.— Carlyle. 

Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with 
difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself 
become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every 
sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.— 
T. W. II IGGINSON. 

Accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use, hear, or read, their 
birth, derivation, and history. For if words are not things, they are living 
powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, 
combined, and harmonized.— Coleridge. 

Words possess an endless, indefinable, tantalizing charm. They paint 
humanity in its thoughts, longings, aspirations, struggles, failures —paint it 
upon a canvas of breath, in the colors of life.— Anon. 

Ye know not what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but 
for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.— 
Ascham. 

Let him who would rightly understand the grandeur and dignity of speech, 
meditate on the deep mystery involved in the revelation of the Lord Jesus 
as the Word of God. —F. W. Farrar. 


Words are lighter than the cloud foam 
Of the restless ocean spray; 

Vainer than the trembling shadow 
That the next hour steals away; 

By the fall of summer rain-drops 
Is the air as deeply stirred; 

And the rose leaf that we tread on 
Will outlive a word. 

Yet on the dull silence breaking 
With a lightning flash, a word, 
Bearing endless desolation 
On its blighting wings, I heard. 

Earth can forge no keener weapon, 
Dealing surer death and pain, 

And the cruel echo answered 
Through long years again. 

I have known one word hang star-like 
O’er a dreary waste of years, 

And it only shone the brighter 
Looked at through a mist of tears. 
While a weary wanderer gathered 
Hope and heart on life’s dark way. 
By its faithful promise shining 
Clearer day by day. 

I have known a spirit calmer 
Then the calmest lake, and clear 
As the heavens that gazed upon it. 
With no wave of hope or fear; 

But a storm had swept across it, 

And its deepest depths were stirred. 
Never, never more to slumber. 

Only by a word. 


Adelaide A. Procter 


PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 


r | ^HE unexpected favor with which this work has been 
received by the public from year to year, since its 
publication in 1873, has made the author anxious to ren¬ 
der it more worthy of regard. He has, therefore, care¬ 
fully revised the work, corrected some errors, and added 
two new chapters, one on “ Onomatopes,” the other on 
“ Names of Men,” besides many pages on the subjects of the 
other chapters. 

Professor G. P. Marsh, in his “ Lectures on the English 
Language,” quotes the saying of a distinguished British 
scholar of the last century, that he had known but three 
of his countrymen who spoke their native language with 
uniform grammatical accuracy; and the Professor adds 
that “ the observation of most persons acquainted with 
English and American society confirms the general truth 
implied in this declaration.” In this statement, made by 
one of the most eminent philologists of the day, is found, 
at least, a partial justification of works like the present, 
if they are properly written. The author is well aware 
that, in writing such a book, he is obnoxious to the com¬ 
plaint of Goethe, that “ everybody thinks that, because he 
can speak, he is entitled to speak about language;” he is 
aware, too, that in his criticisms on the misuses and abuses 
of words, he has exposed himself to criticism; and it may 

vii 



Vlll 


PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 


be that he has been guilty of some of the very sins which 
he has condemned. If so, he sins in good company, since 
nearly all of his predecessors, who have written on the 
same theme, have been found guilty of a similar incon¬ 
sistency, from Lindley Murray down to Dean Alford, 
Breen, Moon, Marsh, and Fowler. If the public is to 
hear no philological sermons till the preachers are fault¬ 
less, it will have to wait forever. “ The only impeccable 
authors,” says Hazlitt, “ are those who never wrote.” 

It is hardly necessary to add that the work is designed 
for popular reading, rather than for scholars. How much 
the author is indebted to others, he cannot say. He has 
been travelling, in his own way, over old and well worn 
ground, and has picked up his materials freely from all 
the sources within his reach. Non nova , sed nove , has been 
his aim; he regrets that he has not accomplished it more 
to his satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does 
not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old 
thoughts be recast. There are some writers, however, to 
whom he has been particularly indebted; they are Arch¬ 
bishop Trench, the Rev. Matthew Harrison, author of “ The 
Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English 
Language,” Professor G. P. Marsh, and especially Arch¬ 
deacon F. W. Farrar, the last of whom in his three lin¬ 
guistic works has shown the ability to invest the driest 
scientific themes with interest. A list of the books con¬ 
sulted will be found on pages 479, 480. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I. 

The Significance of Words.1 

CHAPTER II. 

The Morality in Words. 62 

CHAPTER III. 

Grand Words. 105 

CHAPTER IV. 

Small Words ... 139 

CHAPTER V. 

Words without Meaning. 158 

CHAPTER VI. 

Some Abuses of Words. 177 

CHAPTER VII. 

Saxon Words, or Romanic?. 194 

CHAPTER VIII. 

The Secret of Apt Words. 210 

ix 








X 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER IX. 

The Secret of Apt Words (continued) . . . 229 

CHAPTER X. 

Onomatopes.242 

CHAPTER XL 

The Fallacies in Words.257 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Fallacies in Words (continued) .... 295 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Names of Men.323 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Nicknames .345 

CHAPTER XV. 

Curiosities of Language .367 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Common Improprieties of Speech ..... 424 


Index 


481 







WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


CHAPTER I 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS 


“Speech is morning to the mind; 

It spreads the beauteous images abroad, 
Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.” 

La parole, cette main de resprit.— Charron. 
Syllables govern the world.— Coke. 



0 the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the com- 


- L mon operations of life, which, but for their common¬ 
ness, would be deemed full of marvel, few things are more 
wonderful than the origin, structure, history and signifi¬ 
cance of words. The tongue is the glory of man; for 
though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet lan¬ 
guage, which gives us a duplicate and multipliable exist¬ 
ence,— enabling mind to communicate with mind,— is the 
Rubicon which they never have dared to cross. The dog 
barks as it barked at the creation; the owl hoots in the 
same octaves in which it screamed ages ago; and the crow 
of the cock is the same to-day as when it startled the ear 
of repentant Peter. The song of the lark and the howl of 
the leopard have continued as unchangeable as the concen¬ 
tric circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee; 
and even the stoutest champion of the orang-outang the- 



2 


words; their use and abuse. 


ory of man’s origin will admit that no process of natu¬ 
ral selection has yet distilled significant words out of the 
cries of beasts or the notes of birds. Though we have lit¬ 
tle reason to doubt that animals think, there is yet no 
proof that a single noise made by them expresses a 
thought, and especially an abstraction or a generalization, 
properties characterizing the language of man. He only, 
in this world, is able to classify objects which in some 
respects resemble, and in others differ from one another, 
and to analyze and decompound the various objects of 
thought; and to him is limited the privilege of designat¬ 
ing by arbitrary signs, and describing by distinctive terms, 
the things he thus comprehends. Speech is a divine gift. 
It is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon His 
intelligent offspring, and proves, more conclusively than 
his upright form, or his looks “ commercing with the 
skies,” that he was made in the image of God. Without 
this crowning gift to man, even reason would have been 
comparatively valueless; for he would have felt himself to 
be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the midst of 
a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his race would 
have been as uninstructive as that of barbarians and sav¬ 
ages. The rude tongue of a Patagonian or Australian is 
full of wonders to the philosopher; but as we ascend in the 
scale of being from the uncouth sounds which express 
the desires of a savage to the lofty periods of a Cicero or a 
Chatham, the power of words expands until it attains to 
regions far above the utmost range of our capacity. It 
designates, as Novalis has said, God with three letters, and 
the infinite with as many syllables, though the ideas con¬ 
veyed by these words are immeasurably beyond the utmost 
grasp of man. In every relation of life, at every moment 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


3 


of our active being, in every thing we think or do, it is on 
the meaning and inflection of a word that the direction of 
our thoughts, and the expression of our will, turn. The 
soundness of our reasonings, the clearness of our belief 
and of our judgment, the influence we exert upon others, 
and the manner in which we are impressed by our fellow- 
men,— all depend upon a knowledge of the value of words. 
It is in language that the treasures of human knowledge, 
the discoveries of Science, and the achievements of Art 
are chiefly preserved; it is language that furnishes the poet 
with the airy vehicle for his most delicate fancies, the 
orator with the elements of his electrifying eloquence, 
the savant with the record of his classification, the meta¬ 
physician with the means of his sharp distinction, the 
statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the 
philosopher with the earthly instrument of his heaven- 
reaching induction. 

“ Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an oppo¬ 
nent in the National Assembly, “ are things; ” and truly 
they w'ere such when he thundered them forth from the 
Tribune, full of life, meaning and power. Words are 
always things, when coming from the lips of a master¬ 
spirit, and instinct with his own individuality. Especially 
is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who 
have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for 
thoughts, and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed 
by the whole Third Estate of a nation. Their words are 
not merely things, but living things, endowed with power 
not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spirit¬ 
ual conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their 
birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did not exag¬ 
gerate when he said that “ words are the only things that 


1 


4 words; their use and abuse. 

live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces, 
mausoleums and monuments built at enormous cost and 
during years of toil to perpetuate the memory or preserve 
the ashes of ancient kings, have perished, and left not even 
a trace of their existence. The pyramids of Egypt have, 
indeed, escaped in some degree the changes and chances of 
thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly engulf 
these masses of stone, and “ leave the sand of the desert as 
blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A 
sudden accident may cause the destruction of the finest 
masterpieces of art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo 
Belvedere, or the Venus de Medicis, upon which millions 
have gazed with rapture, may be hopelessly injured or irre¬ 
trievably ruined. A mob shivers into dust the statue of 
Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs 
seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless 
director of the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of 
Correggio’s “ Notte,” where the light breaks from the heav¬ 
enly child, and deprives the picture of one of its fairest 
charms; an inferior pencil retouches the great Vandyck at 
Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its colors; and though 
no such mishap as these befall the product of the painter’s 
skill, yet how often,— 

“ When a new world leaps out at his command, 

And ready nature waits upon his hand: 

When the ripe colors soften and unite, 

And sweetly melt into just shade and light; 

When mellowing years their full perfection give 
And each bold figure just begins to live, 

The treacherous colors the fair art betray, 

And all the bright creation fades away.” 

Not so with words. The language which embodies the 
ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though 
entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


5 


few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and, 
when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men 
by the power of his thought, — not “ from his urn,” like a 
dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his 
very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. 
Look at the “ winged words ” of old Homer, into which he 
breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long 
have the} 7- kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty 
centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of 
time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the 
languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and 
they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. 
“The ‘Venus’ of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have 
vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the 
bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the * chained 
Prometheus' has outlived the ‘ Cupid ’ of Praxiteles, and 
the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.” 

“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A 
word fitly spoken,” says Solomon, “ is like apples of gold 
in pictures of silver.” No artificer’s hand, however cun¬ 
ning, can contrive a mechanism comparable with those 
masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him 
who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid 
words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful 
than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly 
estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums 
one will sometimes see the analysis of a man, — that is, 
the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much 
albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances 
fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with 
his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words 
in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs 


6 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly 
pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains 
at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its 
future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, wdien 
his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how 
his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the 
intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! 
Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for 
show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dic¬ 
tionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the 
mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, 
and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy 
are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded 
Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very 
triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to 
that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? 
“ Scholars,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “ are men of peace. 
They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than 
Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a 
louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock 
of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.” 

The words which a man of genius selects are as much 
his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the 
incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. 
As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing 
of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language 
would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech 
by either of the great orators I have just named, and a 
critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of 
his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with 
which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like 
strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


7 


words for those that are used, and you will find that the 
latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and con¬ 
ception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous 
exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not 
even the most insignificant term can be changed without 
marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea. 
If any other words can be used than those which a writer 
does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the 
surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, 
it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain 
throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a 
consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection 
of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your 
memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words 
in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but 
that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the 
simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well 
think,” says Coleridge, “ of pushing a brick out of a wall 
with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of 
any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.” 

Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of 
Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what 
he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense 
suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly 
said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought 
into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; 
no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s 
melodies,— 

“ Untwisting all the links that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony.” 

But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies 
the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay 


8 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion 
to their effect. “No sooner are they pronounced, than the 
past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty 
start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the 
memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the 
sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the 
whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and 
he who should then hope to conjure with it would find 
himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, 
when he stood crying ‘ Open Wheat, 1 ‘ Open Barley,’ to the 
door which obeyed no sound but ‘ Open Sesame. 1 ” 

The force and significance which Milton can infuse into 
the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description 
of the largest of land animals, in “ Paradise Lost. 11 In a 
single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as com¬ 
ing from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start 
aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:— 

“Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved 
His vastness.” 

Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates 
threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:— 

“ Back to thy punishment, 

False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings, 

Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue 

Thy lingering,— or, with one stroke of this dart, 

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!” 

“ The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “ is felt through 
every movement of this sentence, especially toward the 
close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the 
reader; the hard staccato stops that well might take the 
breath, in attempting to pronounce * or, with one stroke of 
this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of sound in the last 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WOKDS. 


9 


line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a 
full syllable is interpolated even at the csesural pause, it is 
carried off almost without the reader perceiving the sur¬ 
plusage.” No poet better understood than Milton the art 
of heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional 
sacrifice of their harmony. By substituting quantities for 
accented verse, he produces an effect like that of the skilful 
organist who throws into the full tide of instrumental 
music an occasional discord, giving intenser sweetness to 
the notes that follow. 

It is this necromantic power over language,— this skill 
in striking “ the electric chain with which we are darkly 
bound,” till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the 
heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the 
soul,— which blinds us to the absurdities of “Paradise 
Lost.” While following this mighty magician of language 
through 

-“ many a winding bout 

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,” 

we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels 
fight with “ villanous saltpetre ” and divinities talk Cal¬ 
vinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth 
of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a 
school divine. As with Milton, so with his great prede¬ 
cessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pic¬ 
tures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, 
simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “ the in¬ 
visible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence 
describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, 
which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower 
is standing, with dreadful faces at the window.” 

The difference in the use of words by different writers 


10 


words; their use and abuse. 


is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor 
artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon 
the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. 
Who that is familiar with Bacon’s writings can ever fail to 
recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and 
going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been 
remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient 
instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a 
lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave. 
“ All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift 
of expression with a certain secret timidit}^, lest the lever 
should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to 
wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the 
old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he 
had unguardedly provoked.” Who that is familiar with 
Dryden’s “ full, resounding line,” has not admired the magic 
effects he produces with the most familiar words? Macau¬ 
lay well says that in the management of the scientific 
vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary, 
Gibbons, succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers 
from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of 
language became ductile at his touch. Emerson, in speak¬ 
ing of the intense vitality of Montaigne’s words, says that 
if you cut them, they will bleed. Joubert, in revealing 
the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He imparted, if I 
may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna 
des entrailles a tons les mots), and poured into them such a 
charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that 
his writings have an effect upon the soul something like 
that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste 
and intoxicate our understanding.” So in the weird poetic 
fictions of Coleridge there is an indescribable witchery of 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


11 


phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one 
had eaten of “ the insane root that takes the reason 
prisoner.” 

How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to 
“ the fitting of aptest words to things,” which we find on 
every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, 
but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from 
him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; 
subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the 
truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the 
memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird 
influence, 

“Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,” 

and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are 
all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American 
writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s 
marvellous gift of melody, asks: “ Who taught him all the 
hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, 
a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the 
literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we 
did not know were in the language— a softness that seemed 
Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe 
and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the 
French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to 
the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other 
tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, 
and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like 
the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. 
Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, 
and all words seem to be in his hands.” 

Words, with such men, are “ nimble and airy servitors,” 
not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they 


12 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit 
together, are sometimes “ half battles, stronger than most 
men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the weird-like power 
of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers, 
he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of 
expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the 
precise significance of every word he uses; that he has 
conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular 
as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, 
the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? 
Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is 
not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudi¬ 
tion, the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of 
intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest sur¬ 
prise; but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the 
potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the 
simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our 
stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. 
Ideas that seem to defy expression,— ideas so subtile, or so 
vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to 
contemplate them at all,— are conveyed on his page with a 
nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the 
envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor 
marble and bronze become as soft and elaslic as living flesh, 
and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers 
possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy 
and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies; 

“And now ’tis like all instruments, 

Now like a lonely flute, 

And now it is an angel's song, 

That makes the heavens be mute.” 

The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth cen- 


THE SIGHIFICAHCE OF WORDS. 


13 


tury to those of our own day is due not less to their 
choice and collocation of words than to their weight of 
thought. There was no writing public nor reading popu¬ 
lace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual, 
and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to 
studious and thoughtful readers. “ The structure of their 
language,” says Henry Taylor, “ is itself an evidence that 
they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different 
pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be 
looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were 
not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, 
and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such 
as lent wings to haste and impatience, making every¬ 
thing so clear that he who ran or flew might read. 
Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over 
what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that 
brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he 
had wings, they might help him to some more genial 
and profitable employment than that of running like an 
ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics 
of diction by which these writers are made more fit than 
those who have followed them to train the ear and utter¬ 
ance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended 
sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and 
intertextures,— the many parts waiting for the ultimate 
wholeness,— we shall perceive that without distinctive 
movement and rhythmical significance of a very high 
order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained 
in any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences 
is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and 
antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which 
the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running 


14 


words; their use and abuse. 


divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to disso¬ 
ciate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but 
required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his 
mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one 
compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elab¬ 
orately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not 
easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful 
to an intent reader.” 

Few persons are aware how much knowledge is some¬ 
times necessary to give the etymology and definition of a 
word. In 1839 the British Court of Queen’s Bench,— Sir 
F. Pollock, Mr. Justice Coleridge, the Attorney General, 
Sir J. Campbell, and other learned lawyers,— disputed for 
some hours about , the meaning of the word “ upon,” as a 
preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or “be¬ 
fore.” It is easy to define words as certain persons sati¬ 
rized by Pascal have defined light: “ A luminary movement 
of luminous bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined 
murder to a jury: “Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is 
murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes 
murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is — 
murder.” We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition of 
network: “Network — anything reticulated or decussed at 
equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” 
Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of 
Bardolph’s attempt to analyze the term accommodation: 
“ Accommodation,— that is, when a man is, as they say, 
accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he 
may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excel¬ 
lent thing.” Brimstone , for example, the lexicographer 
defines by telling us that it is sulphur ; and then rewards 
us for the trouble we have had in turning to sulphur , 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


15 


by telling us that it is brimstone. The eccentric Davy 
Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal 
of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of 
lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western 
member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a 
bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his 
hearers by incessant repetition,— “ Sit down,” whispered 
Crockett, “ you are coming out of the same hole you 
went in at.” There is a mythical story that the forty 
members of the French Academy once undertook to define 
the word cmJ, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite 
satisfactory: “Crab,— a small red fish, which walks back¬ 
ward.” “ Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when inter¬ 
rogated touching the correctness of the definition; “ per¬ 
fect,— only I will make one small observation in natural 
history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not 
walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is 
admirable.” Too many easily made definitions are liable to 
similar damaging exceptions. 

The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the 
exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word 
is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define 
the word “ alkali ” or “ acid,” for instance, and he will 
have to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry. 
Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chem¬ 
istry, tells us that when he undertook to form a nomencla¬ 
ture of that science, and while he proposed to himself 
nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his 
work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being 
able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of 
chemistry. Often a theory or an argument, which seems 
clear and convincing in its disembodied form, is found to be 


16 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


incoherent and altogether unsatisfactory as soon as it is 
fixed in words on paper. Samuel Bailey, who held a deriv¬ 
ative opinion in favor of Berkeley’s “ Theory of Vision,” 
tells us that having, in the course of a philosophical discus¬ 
sion, occasion to explain it, he found, on attempting to 
state in his own language the grounds on which it rested, 
that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear and 
conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined, 
therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dis¬ 
passionate examination; and the result was a clear convic¬ 
tion of the erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philo¬ 
sophical grounds for which conviction he has so ably and 
luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth 
is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only 
follow accurate and sharply defined notions of the science 
itself. Try to define the words matter , substance, idea , will , 
cause , conscience , virtue , right , and you will soon ascertain 
whether you have grappled with the grand problems or 
only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics. 

Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge 
furnished him of the etymology of a word. He was en¬ 
gaged in a case where the matter at issue was certain river- 
rights, especially touching a branch of the stream known 
by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His clients were in pos¬ 
session of rights formerly possessed by a defunct salmon¬ 
fishing company, formed by strangers from Denmark, and 
they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir” 
for the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party 
contended that it should be open to navigation. A natural 
inference from the name of the piece of water in question 
seemed to turn the scale against O’Connell; for how could 
he establish the right to make that a close weir which, ever 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


17 


since the first existence of the fishery, had been notoriously 
a lax one? His cause seemed desperate, and he had given 
up all hope of success, when victory was wrested from his 
adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of paper that 
was handed to him across the court. These lines informed 
him that in the language of Germany, and the north of 
Europe, lacks , or lax , means a salmon. The “Lax Weir” 
was simply a salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philo¬ 
logical knowledge, O’Connell won not only a verdict for his 
client, but for himself a great and sudden growth of his 
reputation as a young advocate. 

Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the 
study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed 
in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read 
the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining 
each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and 
modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the 
whole range of our language completely under his control. 
One of the most distinguished American authors is said 
to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through 
about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms 
has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in 
fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language 
that lies buried in the pages’of Noah Webster. It is only 
by thus working in the mines of language that one can 
fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the 
necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using 
these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings. 
William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied 
the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint 
himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical 
terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of 


18 


words; their use and abuse. 


expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page, 
content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole 
language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and 
derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his 
students; “You don’t want a diction gathered from the 
newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsug- 
gestive; but you want one wdiose every word is full- 
freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and 
power.” The leading languages of the world are full of 
such words, “ opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are 
imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us 
great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and 
bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages, 
when they are uttered.” 

Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command 
the largest possible number of terms, both “ rich and 
rare,”—words most vivid and effective,— really spirit- 
stirring words; for words there are, as every poet knows, 
whose sound is an echo to the sense,— words which, while 
by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, 
have also a sound and an association which are like music 
to the ear, and a picture to the eye,—vivid, graphic, and 
picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing 
described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, 
Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, 
their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded 
over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a 
quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he 
would take pains to make it his own by using it, as 
speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon 
expressions like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser, 
he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


19 


Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its 
copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque 
vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his 
favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for 
themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept 
a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced 
at effective points. 

The question has been often discussed whether, if man 
were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able 
to think, and to express his thought. The example of the 
deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of 
sound, but of touch,— using combinations of finger-speech, 
instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,—appears 
to show that he might find a partial substitute for his 
present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway 
signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly 
familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the 
steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words 
to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes asso¬ 
ciated with a particular act, and the interposition of words 
becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in 
gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts 
and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the 
Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment 
in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than 
Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, 
both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful 
effect,, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted 
help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal- 
bag before the assembly, declaring that “ it lacked meal,” 
these verbal economists said that “ the mention of the sack 
was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors wished 


20 words; their use and abuse. 

to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their 
country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far 
more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a 
frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar 
like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes 
like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. 
Every one lias heard of the Englishman in China, who, 
wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before 
him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the 
words “ Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well 
understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdi¬ 
nand returned to Naples after the revolutionary move¬ 
ments of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from 
the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though 
made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were per¬ 
fectly intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally 
affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers 
was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand 
being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as ges¬ 
ture is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of 
feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing 
our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The con¬ 
ventionality of language, which can be parroted where there 
is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its 
force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or 
a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate 
speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation 
that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing 
or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the del¬ 
icate shades of difference of which verbal expression is 
capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and 
laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


21 


and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, sub¬ 
jective, and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a 
judgment, or a cognition. 

Facts like these tend to show that man might still have 
been, as the root of the word “ man ” implies in Sanskrit, 
“ a thinking being,” though he had never been a “ speech- 
dividing ” being; but it is evident that his range of thought 
would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his migh¬ 
tiest triumphs over nature would have been impossible. 
While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that 

“ Thought leapt out to wed with thought, 

Ere thought could wed itself to speech,” 

yet there is an intimate relation between ratio and ora- 
tio, and it may well be doubted whether, without some 
signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the 
simplest kind, would not have been beyond man’s power. 
Long use has so familiarized us with language, we employ 
it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we are apt 
to regard it as a matter of course, and become blind to its 
mystery and deep significance. We rarely think of the 
long and changeful history through which each word we 
utter has passed, — of the many changes in form and 
changes in signification it has undergone, — and of the 
time and toil spent in its invention and elaboration by 
successive generations of thinkers and speakers. Still less 
do we think how different man’s history would have been, 
how comparatively useless would have been all his other 
endowments, had God not given him the faculties “ which, 
out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts, 
the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind, 
and his own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the 
great instrument that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and 


22 


words; their use and abuse. 


Massillon wielded, the instrument by which the laws of 
the universe are unfolded, and the subtle workings of the 
human heart brought to light.” Language is not only a 
means of communication between man and man, but it has 
other functions hardly less important. It is only by its 
aid that we are able to analyze our complex impressions, 
to preserve the results of the analysis, and to abbreviate 
the processes of thought. 

Were we content with the bare reception of visual 
impressions, we could to some extent dispense with words; 
but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively, 
but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts, 
and compares them with notions already stored up, it 
becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name. 
By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart 
in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility, 
just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gar¬ 
dener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the 
substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which 
when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their 
connection with language brought always within reach. 
Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought 
which are represented by such words as gravitation, chem¬ 
ical affinity, atomic weight, capital, inverse proportion, polar¬ 
ity, and inertia, — words which are each the quintessence 
and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental 
processes, and which may be compared to the paper money, 
or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be 
inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest cen¬ 
tres of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience 
that would result, and the degree in which mental activity 
would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


23 


comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the 
labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental 
processes? The effect would be to restrict all scientific 
discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would 
be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with 
iron or copper as the sole medium of mercantile inter¬ 
course. 

Language has thus an educational value, for in learning 
words we are learning to discriminate things. “ As the 
distinctions between the relations of objects grow more 
numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic, 
to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are 
born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must 
needs learn to think up to it, to observe and distinguish all 
the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions 
already formed; so that we have an instructor for the 
thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem 
no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two 
things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of 
language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one 
side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on 
the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the 
“ inarticulate ones ” of the world, there may be, for aught 
we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand, 
pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain 
of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express 
their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to 
themselves, they must remain “ mute, inglorious Miltons ” 
forever. A man of genius who is illiterate, or who has little 
command of language, is like a painter with no pigments 
but gray and dun. How, then, shall he paint the purple 
and crimson of the sunset? Though he may have made the 


24 


words; their use and abuse. 


circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders of 
Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond 
commonplace, In bridging the chasm between such a man 
and one of high culture, the acquisition of words plays 
as important a part as the acquisition of ideas. 

It has been justly said that no man can learn from or 
communicate to another more than the words they are 
familiar with either express or can be made to express. 
The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the 
brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. This 
poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the power of 
abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A 
savage may have a dozen verbs for “ I am here,” “ I am 
well,” “ I am thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “ am 
he may have a dozen words for “ my head,” “your head,” 
etc.; but he can hardly conceive of a head apart from its 
owner. Nearly all the tongues of the American savages 
are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even whole 
sentences are compressed together so violently, that often 
no single syllable would be capable of separate use. The 
Abb6 Domenech states that such is the absolute deficiency 
of the simplest abstractions in some of these languages 
that an Indian cannot say “ I smoke ” without using such 
a number of concrete pictures that his immensely long 
word to represent that monosyllabic action means: “ I 
breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone 
bowl wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea 
of “ day,” the Pawnees use such a word as shakoorooces- 
hairet , and their word for “ tooth ” is the fearful polysyl¬ 
lable kliotsiakatatkhiisin! The word for “ tongue ” in Tlat- 
skanai has twenty-two letters. Though these vocables, 
which bristle with more consonants than the four sneezes 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


25 


of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De Quin¬ 
sy says, “ to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexi¬ 
can has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language 
the common address to a priest is the one word Notlazoma- 
huizteopixcatatzin ; that is, “ Venerable priest, whom I 
honor as a father.” A fagot is tlatlatlalpistiteutli , and 
“ if the fagot were of green wood, it could hardly make a 
greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would have been 
obliged to say “ I love you,” in this language, in this style, 
ni-mits-tsikdivakd-tlasolta ; and instead of a kiss he would 
have had to ask for a tetenna-miquilitzli. “ Dieu merci! ” 
exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “ quand on 
a prononce le mot on a bien merite la chose.” 

It is easy to see, from these facts, what an obstacle the 
language of the savage presents to his civilization. Let us 
suppose a savage to possess extraordinary natural endow¬ 
ments, and to learn any one of the leading languages of 
Europe; is it not easy to see that he would find himself 
prepared for labor in departments of mental effort which 
had been before utterly inaccessible to him, and that he 
would feel that his powers had been cheated out of their 
action by this possession of only inferior tools? Hence 
the knowledge of words is not an elegant accomplishment 
only, not a luxury, but a positive necessity of the civilized 
and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who 
would express himself, but to him who would think , with 
precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof of 
thorough and accurate culture than the fact that a writer, 
instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard, 
chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his 
thought. As he only can be called a well dressed man 
whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and 


26 


words; their use and abuse. 


shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first charac¬ 
teristic of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas. 
They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant’s 
robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a 
boy’s garments into which a man has painfully squeezed 
himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect 
exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous 
words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly 
speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most 
closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having 
some nice shade of distinction,— a fine illustration of which 
is found in Ben Jonson’s line, “ Men may securely sin, but 
safely never”; and, again, in the reply with which Sydney 
Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in 
England: “Pooh! pooh! it is the worst educated country in 
the world, I grant you; but it is the best instructed .” 
William Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of 
style. Fox said of him: “Though I am myself never at a 
loss for a word, Pitt not only has a word, but the word,— 
the very word,— to express his meaning.” Robert Hall 
chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he 
gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could 
so rarely approach the realization of his own beau-ideal of 
a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was cor¬ 
recting the proofs of his sermon on “ Modern Infidelity,” on 
coming to the famous passage, “ Eternal God, on what are 
thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt 
and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require 
to be enveloped in a darknes’s which the eye of Heaven 
must not penetrate?”—he exclaimed to his friend, Dr. 
Gregory: “ Penetrate! did I say penetrate , sir, when I 
preached it? ” “ Yes.” “ Do you think, sir, I may venture 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WOKDS. 


27 


to alter it? for no man who considers the force of the 
English language would use a word of three syllables there 
but from absolute necessity. For penetrate put pierce: 
pierce is the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there.” 

John Foster was a yet more striking example of this 
conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. 
Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of 
whose mind, telegraphing with all nature’s works, was so 
in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was almost 
painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, drop 
by drop. He would spend whole days on a few short sen¬ 
tences, passing each word under his concentrated scrutiny, 
so that each, challenged and examined, took its place in the 
structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks. When 
Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster 
was about, he replied: 41 Hard at it, at the rate of a line a 
week.” Read a page of the essay on “ Decision of Charac¬ 
ter,” and you will feel that this was scarcely an exaggera¬ 
tion,— that he stood by the ringing anvil till every word 
was forged into a bolt. Few persons know how hard easy 
writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling verse of 
Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and 
anxious thought, which a single word often cost him? 
Irving tells us that he was once riding with the Irish poet 
in the streets of Paris, when the hackney-coach went sud¬ 
denly into a deep rut, out of which it came with such a jolt 
as to send their pates bump against the roof. “By Jove, 
I've got it!" cried Moore, clapping his hands with great 
glee. “Got what?” said Irving. “Why,” said the poet, 
“that word I’ve been hunting for six weeks, to complete 
my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me.” 

The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice 


28 


words; their use and abuse. 


and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and ar¬ 
rangement of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven 
years in the composition of the iEneid, intended to devote 
three years to its revision; but, being prevented by his last 
sickness from giving it the finishing touches which his ex¬ 
quisite judgment deemed necessary, he directed his friends 
to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his style, 
transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that 
it was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for 
delivery in public, should write down his thoughts,— he 
must, as it were, sculpture them in brass. He must not 
content himself with that loose use of language which 
characterizes a thoughtless fluency, but his words must 
have a precise and exact look, like newly minted coin, with 
sharply cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes himself 
“recked his own rede” in this matter we have abundant 
proof in almost every page of his great speeches. In his 
masterpieces we are introduced to mysteries of prose com¬ 
position of which the moderns know nothing. We find 
him, as a German critic has remarked, bestowing incredible 
pains, not only upon the choice of words, but upon the 
sequence of long and short syllables, not in order to pro¬ 
duce a regularly recurring metre, but to express the most 
various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-chang¬ 
ing rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with 
reference to their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the 
action for which his name is a synonym, that he exhibits 
his consummate dexterity as an orator. Change their 
order, and you at once break the charm. The rhythm, in 
fact, is the sense. You destroy the significance of the 
sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity of the 
meaning as well as the verbal force. “ At his pleasure,” 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


29 


says Professor Marsh, “ he separates his lightning and his 
thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget 
the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up 
the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion that stuns, 
prostrates and crushes the stoutest opponent.” 

Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of 
euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange 
their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as 
would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful 
effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in 
all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of 
words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the 
charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason, 
that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent 
Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power 
of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master 
of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Caesar 
himself tremble, and at last change his determined pur¬ 
pose, and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. 
When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain 
occasion, the sentence, “Patris dictum, sapiens temeritas filii 
comprobavit ,” it was astonishing, says Cicero, to observe 
the general applause which followed that harmonious close. 
Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that 
period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us 
that had the final measure,— what is technically called a 
dichoree ,— been changed, and the words placed in a different 
order, their whole effect would have been absolutely de¬ 
stroyed. With the same exquisite sensibility to numbers, 
an ancient writer says that a similar result would follow, 
if, in reading the first line of the iEneid, 

“Arma virumqne cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris,” 


30 


words; their use and abuse. 


instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being 
long, and us short). 

It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful ar¬ 
rangement of words, that, even more than the thought, 
eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has 
been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. 
More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property; 
and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even 
diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow 
commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; 
but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness 
or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for 
his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “ the ordered 
march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s 
charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods 
which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in 
spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his 
infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of Eng¬ 
land. 

It has been truly said by a brilliant New England 
writer that this mystery of stjde,— why it is, that when 
one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when 
another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent 
phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,— has never 
been sounded. “ One can understand a little how the wink 
or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how 
a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a 
boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. 
But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in 
sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will 
insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph 
will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


31 


an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so 
gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to 
lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,— who 
has fathomed yet this wonder?” 

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to 
suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces 
of literature by means of translations. Among the argu¬ 
ments against the study of the dead languages, none is 
more pertinaciously urged by the educational red repub¬ 
licans of the day than this,— that the study is useless, 
because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, 
have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot 
enjoy Carlyle’s version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s 
Cicero, Morris’s Virgil, Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epic¬ 
tetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a pro¬ 
digious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even 
improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opin¬ 
ion of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this 
seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar 
knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the 
finest passages in an author,— the exquisite thoughts, the 
curious verbal felicities,— are precisely those which defy 
reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly trans¬ 
lations of them are no more like the original than a 
walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence 
of a writer,— the life and spirit,— all that is idiomatic, 
peculiar, or characteristic,— all that is Homerian in 
Homer, or Horatian in Horace,— evaporates in a transla¬ 
tion. 

It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost 
every word in one language has equivalents in every 
other; but a critical study of language shows that, with 


32 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 

the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, 
there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between 
any two words in different tongues. Compare any two 
languages, and you will find that there are, as the 
mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quan¬ 
tities, many words in each untranslatable into the other, 
and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to suppl}’ 
an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy image from the 
language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk 
of the original word and its translated representative, is, 
in thousands of instances, not annular ; the centres do not 
coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sen¬ 
sible objects are not always exact equivalents in any two 
languages. It might be supposed that a berg (the 
German for mountain or hill) was a berg all the world 
over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in 
one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word 
expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer * 
has said, this is far from being the case. The English 
“ mountain,” for instance, refers to something bigger than 
the German berg. On the other hand, “hill,” which has 
the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far 
too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact 
rendering in any English vocable. 

A comparison of the best English versions of the New 
Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inade¬ 
quacy of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised 
Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was 
expended by the best scholars in England and the United 
States, many niceties of expression which mark the original 
fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue 


*Karl Hildebrand. 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


33 


compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can 
draw a clear line where other languages can only make 
a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same 
English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate 
many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning. 
Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible 
to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in 
meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs 
both rendered “love,”* in John xxi, 15-17. “The word 
first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New 
Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. 
It is used of God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16—‘God 
so loved the world,’ etc.— and of man’s love to God, as in 
Matt, xxii, 37 —‘ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ etc. 
The other word more particularly implies that warmth of 
feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used 
respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou 
lovest is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John him¬ 
self, when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus 
loved' Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ 

serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine 

Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the 
Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness, 
does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole 

heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other 

word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal 
affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the 
same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the 
question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the 
term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again 
as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to 


* ayanau) and </>iAew. 


34 


words; their use and abuse. 


His own loving heart.” * Now all this is lost through the 
comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent 
the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must 
be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact 
that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have 
been rendered “appoint” in the ordinary version, no fewer 
than fourteen which stand for “give,” and no fewer than 
twenty-one which correspond to “ depart,” 

Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle 
an essence to be poured from one vessel into another 
without loss. Of Cicero’s elegant and copious rhetoric, of 
the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic 
penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, 
of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of 
Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling 
through an English medium; but of the beauties and 
splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,— never. As soon 
will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator 
echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the 
“Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or another 
poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect 
transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe 
somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot 
preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a 
strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex 
and vague operation of words upon the mind that the 
translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of 
books, “ are not seldom talismans and spells.” They have, 
especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of 
necromantic power, aside from their significance as repre- 

*“ Companion to the Revised "Version of the English New Testament,” by 
Alexander Roberts, D.D. 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


35 


sentative signs. Over and above their meanings as given 
in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has 
gathered round them by their employment for hundreds 
of years. There are in every language certain magical 
words, which, though they can be translated into other 
tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken 
tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corre¬ 
sponding words in those tongues. Such words in English 
are gentleman, comfort , and home , about each of which 
cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested 
by any foreign words by which they can be rendered. 
There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a 
delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening 
associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, 
and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if 
the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make 
lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often 
repeated, is not the dress of thought; it is its living expres¬ 
sion, and controls both the physiognomy and the organi¬ 
zation of the idea it utters. 

How many abortive attempts have been made to trans¬ 
late the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” into English verse! 
What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of 
the grandest passages in the old bard! The former, it has 
been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epi¬ 
grams, sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles” of Ovid; 
the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors 
of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which 
gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achseans, 
the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have 
much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded 
as an English poem, Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” is 


36 


words; their use and abuse. 


unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified pro¬ 
duction; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into 
another language, it is but a caput mortaum , containing 
but little more of Homer than the names and events. The 
fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the 
mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and fresh¬ 
ness of the images,— all that breathes of an earlier world, 
and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue 
sky, of the old iEgean,— all this, as a critic has observed, 
“ is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall 
of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like 
the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like 
words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a 
literary artist; instead of the ever varied, resounding swell 
of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern 
couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing 
chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled 
shoes, the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig of the 
eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more of the spirit 
of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the 
Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast 
that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. 
Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more suc¬ 
cessful in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each 
has gained some advantages by compensating defects. 

Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “ iEneid ” 
into verse ? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled 
during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodi¬ 
ment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old 
Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his 
manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English 
literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradis^ 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


37 


Lost, when he attempted, even in the same language, to 
put it into rhyme,— a proposal to do which drew from 
Milton the contemptuous remark: “Ay, young man; you 
can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made a 
more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of 
Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and 
powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate 
vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So 
with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions 
of “the first finder of our faire language” contain much 
admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are sim¬ 
ply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors 
and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,— 
above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, 
the exquisite tone of naivete , which, like the lispings of 
infancy, give such a charm to his verse,— utterly vanish. 
Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply 
because failure was inevitable,—-because this aroma of 
antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern lan¬ 
guage, is sure to evaporate. 

All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of 
expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to 
the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the 
story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,— the essence, 
the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might 
a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give 
the expression of one of Raphael’s or Titian’s master¬ 
pieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those 
which a great poet has used, to convey the same mean¬ 
ing. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a 
manner of his own, without w'hich the identity and truth 
of his work are lost, If, then, the meaning and spirit of 


38 


words; their use and abuse. 


a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, 
so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must 
it not a fortiori be impossible to transport them faith¬ 
fully across the barriers which divide one language from 
another, and antiquity from modern times? 

How many ineffectual attempts have been made to 
translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to 
give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, 
of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such ex¬ 
quisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imita¬ 
tion. All experience shows that the traduttore must 
necessarily be tradittore ,— the translator, a traducer of 
the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a 
crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, 
as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious 
synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested 
association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric. 
The special imagination of the poet, it has been well 
said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with lan¬ 
guage; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, 
subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympa¬ 
thies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which 
another never could have extracted from them. It is of 
the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in the highest 
exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the ren¬ 
dering of an idea in appropriate language; but the con¬ 
ception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are a 
simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full- 
grown, in its panoply of radiant utterance. 

The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and 
Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction 
with the body. Separation is death, Alter the melody 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


39 


ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot 
translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of 
a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than 
poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one 
containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful 
linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring 
the raw material of the original sentiment into his own 
tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is al¬ 
tered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; 
there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, 
but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration 
to say that there is as much contrast between the best 
translation and the original of a great author, as between 
a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered 
foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green 
robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original 
painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,— a barely 
“good” original book to any lifeless translation. A liv¬ 
ing dog is better than a dead lion; for the external 
attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit 
that makes them terrible. 

The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of 
whose onomatopoeia we are ignorant, will appear still 
more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous 
blunders are made in translating even from one living 
language into another. Few English-speaking persons can 
understand the audacity of Racine, so highly applauded by 
the French, in introducing the words chien and sel into 
poetry; “ dog” and “salt” may be used by us without dan¬ 
ger; but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “ entrails” 
in the way the French do. Every one has heard of the 
Frenchman, who translated the majestic exclamation of 


40 


words; their use and abuse. 


Milton’s Satan, “Hail! horrors, hail!” by “ Comment vous 
portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs , comment vous portez - 
vous?" “How do you do, horrors, how do you do?” 
Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage 
from Shakespeare in his own tongue, 

“Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, 

So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone ,“ 

translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off 
with you!” In the opera of “ Macbetto,” the term “hell- 
broth ” in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian polto 
inferno. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by 
a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who 
metamorphoses the expression, “ clothes me with king¬ 
doms,” into “me fait tin vetement de royaumes," —“makes 
me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer 
as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the 
Succession in Spain,” translates the French word abbe by 
“abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into 
a foreign language is that, though every word the trans¬ 
lator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the 
combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the 
words arlne and rive are both to be found in the best 
French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the 
niceties of that language, should write 

“Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l’ar^ne,” 
he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by 
the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom 
will not admit of the expression sur la rive du fleuve, 
correct though each word may be taken singly, but re¬ 
quires the phrase sur le bord de la riviere, as it does 
amasser du sable, and not amasser de Varene. What can 
be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


41 


describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, 
where', he says, the air was 

“Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings," 
a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will 
convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that 
are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the 
translator to hit so near to the original as to write 

"Stirred with the noise of quivering wings," 

will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let 
one translate into another language the following line of 
Shakespeare, 

" The learned pate ducks to the golden fool," 

and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the 
words we have italicized would be reproduced? 

The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly 
exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shake¬ 
speare with such a version as we might expect in another 
language: 

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! 

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night 
Become the touches of sweet harmony." 

A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute 

and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of 

poetry, after some such fashion as the following: 

“With what a charm the moon serene and bright 
Lends on the bank its soft reflected light! 

Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear 
The strains melodious, with a raptured ear; 

For soft retreats, and night’s impressive hour, 

To harmony impart divinest power." 

In view of all these considerations what can be more 
untrue than the statement so often made, that to be 
capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of 


42 


words; their use and abuse. 


a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed, 
goes upon the assumption that one language is just like 
another language,— that every language has all the ideas, 
turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associa¬ 
tions, abstractions, points of view which every other lan¬ 
guage has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true 
that all languages are pretty much alike for the purposes 
of Science; but even in this respect some are more suit¬ 
able than others, which have to coin words or to borrow 
them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages 
are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for 
those universal and eternal truths in which Science con¬ 
sists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally 
rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, 
equally happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities 
of thought of some original and fertile mind, who has 
availed himself of one of them? * * * 

“It seems that a really great author must admit of 
translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when 
he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as 
in his own. Then Shakespeare is a genius because he can 
be translated into German, and not a genius because he 
cannot be translated into French. The multiplication table 
is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because 
it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to 
belong to any one language whatever. Whereas I should 
rather have conceived that, in proportion as ideas are 
novel and recondite, they would be difficult to put into 
words, and that the very fact of their having insinuated 
themselves into one language would diminish the chance 
of that happy accident being repeated in another. In the 
language of savages you can hardly express any idea or 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


43 


act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hotten¬ 
tot or Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius 
of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cer¬ 
vantes?” * 

The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot 
be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that 
ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a 
foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French 
critic: “ You are that ignorant musician who plays his part 
exactly, not skipping a single note, nor neglecting a rest,— 
only what is written in the key of /«, he plays in the key of 
sol . Faithful translator! ” 

When we think of the marvellous moral influence which 
words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that 
the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them, 
“a certain bewitchery or fascination,” indicating that lan¬ 
guage is of mystic origin. The Jews, believing that God 
had revealed a full-grown language to mankind, attached 
a divine character to language, and supposed that there 
was a natural and necessary connection between words 
and things. The name of a person was not a mere con¬ 
ventional sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part 
of the person himself. Hence we And in Genesis no less tha?n 
fifty derivations of names, in almost all of which the deri¬ 
vation connects the name, prophetically or otherwise, with 
some event in the person’s life. Hence, also, the practice, 
under certain conditions, of changing men’s names, as illus¬ 
trated in the histories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joshua 
and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara 
(bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech. 
“Even in the New Testament we find our Lord Himself in 


*“ University Sermons,” by J. H. Newman. 


44 


words; their use and abuse. 


a solemn moment fixing on the mind of His greatest apostle 
a new and solemn significance given to the name he bore. 
‘ Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.’ 
St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a name when, in 
Phil, iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend as yvrj<rte 
Zv£uye, ‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and very 
probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there 
a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even 
their mysterious alphabetical characters, called “ Runes,” 
possessed magical powers; that they could stop a sailing 
vessel or a flying arrow,— that they could excite love or 
hate, or even raise the dead. The Greeks believed that 
there was a necessary, mysterious connection between 
words and the objects they signified, so that man uncon¬ 
sciously expressed, in the words whereby he named things 
or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as 
though in a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The 
accidental good omen in the name of an envoy who was 
called Hegesistratos, or “leader of an army,” decided a 
Greek general to assist the Samians, and led to the bat¬ 
tle of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to 
enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius, 
Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Csesar gave a command in 
Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the omen which his 
name involved. When an expedition had been planned 
under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the soldiers abso¬ 
lutely refused to proceed under a commander of so ill 
omened a name,— dux abominandi nominis ,— it being, as 
De Quincey says, “ a pleonasm of darkness.” The same 
deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the 
favete Unguis and bona verba quceso of the Romans, by 
which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


45 


word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so suggested 
to the imagination should actually occur. So they were 
careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any 
word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying 
vixit instead of mortuus est , and “ be the event fortunate or 
otherwise,” instead of “ adverse.” The name Egesta they 
changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axei- 
nos into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to 
escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum , or 
detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has pre¬ 
vailed,— an illustration of which we have in the life of 
Pope Adrian YI, who, when elected, dared not retain his 
own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardi¬ 
nals that every Pope who had done so had died in the first 
year of his reign.* 

That there is a secret instinct which leads even the 
most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, 
is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in 
“ the black art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influ¬ 
ence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that 
demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be 
made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is 
to write a man’s name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier, 
an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where 
two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed, 
will be wrought against the person whose name is so 
inscribed. 

But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations 
to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day, 

*We have heard of an Englishman’s deploring with the deepest pathos his 
having been named “James,” asserting that it had to some extent made a 
flunkey of his very soul, against his will. 


46 


words; their use and abuse. 


hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish exam¬ 
ples of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth, 
that “ a light flashes out of a word sometimes which fright¬ 
ens one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has 
dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there 
were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one 
of his characters say of another, “ She speaks poniards, and 
every word stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are 
sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a 
score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain 
of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy con¬ 
veyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often 
has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a 
sublime yet undecided purpose, — a word of sympathy 
opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect 
of heaven,— a word of truth fired a man of action to do a 
deed which has saved a nation or a cause,— or a genius 
to write words which have gone ringing down the ages! 

“ I have known a word more gentle 
Than the breath of summer air; 

In a listening heart it nestled, 

And it lived forever there. 

Not the beating of its prison 
Stirred it ever, night or day; 

Only with the heart’s last throbbing 
Could it ever fade away.” 

A late writer has truly said that “ there may be phrases 
which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to 
explore; a single word may be a window from which one 
may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory 
of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated 
volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years 
of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sen¬ 
tence.” 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


47 


“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable 
than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A 
thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no 
utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be 
conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take 
the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains un¬ 
spoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden 
idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something 
sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like 
bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the 
rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all 
along, in spite of its smiling surface.” 

The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, 
perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of 
speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of 
language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, 
government, or interests ; and nations of one speech, 
though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more 
widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. 
Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of 
Arndt, “ Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland ?” w T as founded 
upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge , 
the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, 
and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which 
the song was received showed that the poet had struck a 
chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When 
a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in 
subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its 
character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, 
and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the 
two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, 
and this can be done only by killing its language; for it 


48 


words; their use and abuse. 


is through its language that its national prejudices, its 
loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, 
the old language, slowly dying out,— if, indeed, it dies at 
all,— has time to convey the national traditions into the 
new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep 
the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the 
Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of 
which that language is the representative and the vehicle, 
has been permitted by the English government to die a 
lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexist¬ 
ence of iwo languages in a state is one of the greatest 
misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of town¬ 
ships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of 
foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily news¬ 
paper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a 
foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national ani¬ 
mosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of 
our foreign population. 

The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of 
the middle ages, appear to be glebce adscriptitice, and to 
extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, 
is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered 
Greece, could not plant her language there. The barba¬ 
rians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the lan¬ 
guages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slaves who 
settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the 
Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the 
Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the 
Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes 
they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good 
authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear 
and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


49 


sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, 
failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He 
might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on 
their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his 
power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, 
Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his lan¬ 
guage; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, 
as had Charlemagne before him. 

England has maintained her dominion in the East for 
more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of 
Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. 
In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict 
that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should 
speak and write one language,— German; but the people 
recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. 
Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and 
the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were 
for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they 
spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent 
countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more 
heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The 
strongest bond of union between the different States of 
this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the 
geographical unity of our territory, but the one common 
language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the 
great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the 
different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political 
structure or sagacity of political administration could hold 
so many States together amidst such diversities of culture 
and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our 
unity of speech,— the common language in which we 


50 


words; their use and abuse. 


express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and 
commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common lit¬ 
erature, and enabling us to read the same books, news¬ 
papers, printed lectures and speeches,— this is like a soul 
animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer 
unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles 
could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country 
as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the 
task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, 
which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens 
of the North and of the South into one homogeneous peo¬ 
ple, would be almost hopeless? 

As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain 
that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other 
nations than the exploration through their languages of 
their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech 
of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowl¬ 
edge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate 
in some respects than he could gain by personal inter¬ 
course with them. He will feel the pulse of their national 
life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology 
many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded 
by national prejudice, he had never dreamed. 

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power 
of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when 
nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, 
the man who makes them potent. As it was not the 
famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late 
Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of 
the Prussian soldier,— the man behind the gun, educated in 
the best common schools in the world,— so it is the latent 
heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


51 


them momentum and projectile force. The same words, 
coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses 
the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot 
that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is 
the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the 
man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with 
meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he 
makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their 
destination, or to do any execution should they hit the 
mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments 
depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than 
upon the degree in which they have been organized into 
the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less 
upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored 
away in their formation, which is liberated in their pub¬ 
lication. 

There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, 
and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, 
and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like 
consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren 
signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the 
life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They 
inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. 
Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original 
perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by 
constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. 
Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of elo¬ 
quence have been produced by words which, when read, 
strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that 
Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “ Mesopo¬ 
tamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact. 

Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that 


52 words; their use and abuse. 

“ every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, 
three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word 
of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly 
fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville, 
often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant; 
but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the 
patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and 
destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, 
but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and 
constitution, the trip-hammer momentum with which he 
makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even 
the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words 
impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelm¬ 
ingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense 
current of his physical energy.” When the great cham¬ 
pion of New England said, in the United States Senate, 
“ There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and 
there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of char¬ 
acter, and of all the associations connected with it, which 
changed that which, uttered by another, would have been 
the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. 
The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quick¬ 
ened the pulse even of “ the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is 
due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which 
had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three 
spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It 
was this which gave such prodigious power to the words 
of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an 
electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of supe¬ 
riority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl 
of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending 
lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and, 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


53 


above all, the evidence which these furnished of an impe¬ 
rious and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest 
peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform 
the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing 
from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop¬ 
guns. 

In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are 
reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who 
heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the 
creative individuality projected into the words that makes 
the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the 
poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that 
Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by 
the simple words, “ Who said that?" An acute American 
writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essen¬ 
tially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though 
of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls 
Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may 
not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance 
when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke 
glaring through it.* What can be more effective than 
the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? 
Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s 
shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, 
had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have 
sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers 
not merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he 
says it. 

“ Let but a lord once own the happy lines, 

How the wit brightens, how the style refines 1 ” 

says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet 


* “Literature and Life," by Edwin P. Whipple. 


54 


words; their use and abuse. 


says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, 
that 

“Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway.” 

Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of 
position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat 
Ulysses to intercede for her; “for the arguments,” says 
she, “ which are uttered by men of repute, are very differ¬ 
ent in strength from those uttered by men unknown.” 

The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon 
the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of 
different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter 
the word “ grand,” and our sense of the word is modified 
according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions 
represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are 
different from every other man’s; and into this difference 
enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the 
shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education, 
the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that 
distinguishes him from another man. 

Mr. Whipple says truly that “ there are no more simple 
words than ‘ green,’ ‘ sweetness,’ and * rest,’ yet what depth 
and intensity of significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’; 
what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ‘ sweetness,’ 
as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards; what 
celestial repose beams from ‘ rest ’ as it lies on the page of 
Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of 
language; yet they are expressed in common words, trans¬ 
figured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality 
which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking 
of style as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that 
“ the marvel of Shakespeare’s diction is its immense sug¬ 
gestiveness,— his power of radiating through new verbal 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


55 


combinations, or through single expressions, a life and 
meaning which they do not retain in their removal to 
dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the emo¬ 
tion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it 
cannot be flashed upon the ‘ inward eye,’ it is hinted to 
the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. An 
American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speak¬ 
ing of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays, 
refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost 
as remarkable as the thing it describes. * The recitation,’ 
he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from 
all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with 
invitations to its own inaccessible homes!' 1 He who has not 
felt this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read 
him. He may have looked at the words, but has never 
looked into them.” 

The fact that words are never taken absolutely,— that 
they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, 
but of natures,— that they are media for the emission and 
transpiration of character,— is one that cannot be too 
deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent 
young men who wonder that the words which they utter 
with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with 
their hearers, should ask themselves whether their char¬ 
acters are such as to give weight to their words. As in 
engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least 
one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s 
character should be a hundred times heavier than what 
he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the 
“ universe,” the word has quite another meaning than 
when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have 
never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a 


56 


words; their use and abuse. 


man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “ the 
solemn responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference 
in the weight of the words whether they come from one 
who has been tried and proved in the world’s fiery furnace, 
and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive 
home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates 
of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which 
are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a 
hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks 
of “ trials and tribulations ” which he has never felt. 
“Words,” says the learned Selden, “must be fitted to a 
man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the fellow that was 
to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first 
to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.” 

Few things are more interesting in the study of a lan¬ 
guage, than to note how much it gains by time and 
culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and 
other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifi¬ 
cations of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all 
the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with 
the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and 
refined. The language of an old and highly civilized 
people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad 
and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce 
of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it 
had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max 
Muller has observed, since the beginning of the world no 
new addition has ever been made to the substantial ele¬ 
ments of speech, any more than to the substantial elements 
of nature. There is a constant change in language, a 
coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent 
an entirely new word. Before a novel term can be intro- 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


57 


duced into use, there must be some connection with a 
former term,— a bridge to enable the mind to pass over 
to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable 
has dropped out of the language,— has become dead or 
obsolete,— it is almost as impossible to call it back to life 
as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, 
it is true, speaks of commanding “old words that have 
long slept to wake;” and Horace declares that many 
words will be born again that have seemingly dropped 
into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik 
says, “ very little revivification has ever taken place in 
human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce 
into a language a dozen new words than restore to 
general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true 
that when Thomson published his “Castle of Indolence,” 
he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words, 
of which not a few, as “ carol,” “ glee,” “ imp,” “ appall,” 
“ blazon,” “ sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is true, 
also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge, 
Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocab¬ 
ularies with words taken from the more archaic and 
obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in 
use many words that were more or less neglected during 
the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is 
probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and 
working condition, were never actually dead, but only in 
a state of suspended animation. 

It has been calculated that our English language, 
including the nomenclature of the arts and sciences, con¬ 
tains one hundred thousand words; yet of this immense 
number it is surprising how few are in common use. It is 
a common opinion that every Englishman and American 


58 


words; their use and abuse. 


speaks English, every German German, and every French¬ 
man French. The truth is, that each person speaks only 
that limited portion of the language with which he is 
acquainted. To the great majority even of educated men, 
three-fourths of these words are almost as unfamiliar as 
Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon all the obso¬ 
lete or obsolescent words; all the words of special arts or 
professions; all the words confined in their usage to par¬ 
ticular localities; all the words of recent coinage which 
have not yet been naturalized; all the words which even 
the educated speaker uses only in homoeopathic doses,— 
and it is astonishing into what a manageable volume your 
plethoric Webster or Worcester will have shrunk. It has 
been calculated that a child uses only about one hundred 
words; and, unless he belongs to the educated classes, he 
will never employ more than three or four hundred. A 
distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers 
or writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary 
persons, of fair intelligence, not over three or four thou¬ 
sand. Even the great orator, who is able to bring into 
the field, in the war of words, half the vast array of 
light and heavy troops which the vocabulary affords, yet 
contents himself with a far less imposing display of verbal 
force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of 
words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges 
with using a “Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thou¬ 
sand; and Shakespeare himself, “the myriad-minded,” only 
fifteen thousand. Each word, however, has a variety of 
meanings, with more or fewer of which every man is 
familiar, so that his knowledge of the language, which has 
practically over a million of words, is far greater than it 
appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the diffi- 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


59 


culty of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is 
greatly overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the 
boast of every new dictionary-maker that his vocabulary 
contains so many thousand words more than those of his 
predecessors. This may, or may not, be a merit; but it is 
certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson that does 
not contain some word — obsolete, un-English, or purely 
scientific — that has no business there; while Webster and 
Worcester cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a 
time; each doing his best to load and deform his pages, 
and all the while triumphantly challenging the world to 
observe how prodigious an advantage he has gained over 
his rivals. 

We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the 
meaning of words; but it is life that discloses to us their 
significance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is 
the actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures 
and pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible mean¬ 
ings— meanings not to be found in Worcester or Webster. 
Does the young and light-hearted maiden know the mean¬ 
ing of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a business 
career understand the significance of the words “ failure ” 
and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many- 
storied building under a July sun, for the meaning of 
“toil”; and, for a definition of “overwork,” go to the pale 
seamstress who 

“In midnight’s chill and murk 
Stitches her life into her work; 

Bending backwards from her toil, 

Lest her tears the silk might soil; 

Shaping from her bitter thought 
Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not; 

Satirizing her despair 

With the emblems woven there!” 


60 


words; their use and abuse. 


Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, 
friends, and reputation,— with disease racking every 
limb,— for the definition of “remorse”; and go to the 
bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of 
“ health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us 
the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our 
hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is 
a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicogra¬ 
pher. Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles 
to their graves who know not the force of the commonest 
terms; while to others their terrible significance comes 
home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the inner¬ 
most fibres of their being. 

To conclude,— it is one of the marvels of language, 
that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which 
the human voice is capable, have been formed all the 
articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, 
have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human 
race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated 
that one thousand million writers, in one thousand mill¬ 
ion years, could not write out all the combinations of 
the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer 
were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each 
page should contain different orders of the twenty-four 
letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs 
are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the proper¬ 
ties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while 
at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to 
receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can 
estimate the misery that man would experience were his 
sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would 


THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS. 


give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and 
peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead? 

“If Nature thunder’d in his opening ears, 

And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres, 

How would he wish that Heaven had left him still 
The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!” 


CHAPTER II. 


THE MORALITY IK WORDS. 


Genus dicendi imitatur publicos mores. . . Non potest alius esse ingenio, 
alius animo color.— Seneca. 

The world is satisfied with words; few care to dive beneath the surface.— 
Pascal. 

Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in accounts, ciphers and 
symbols pass for real sums, so, in the course of human affairs, words and names 
pass for things themselves.— Robert South. 

Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.— Isaiah v, 20. 


HE fact that a man’s language is a part of his charac- 



ter,— that the words he uses are'an index to his mind 
and heart,— must have been noted long before language 
was made a subject of investigation. “ Discourse,’' says 
Quintilian, “ reveals character, and discloses the secret dis¬ 
position and temper; and not without reason did the Greeks 
teach that as a man lived so would he speak.” Profert 

enitn mores plernmque oratio, et animi secreta detegit. Nec 

% 

sine causa Greed prodiderunt , at vie at, quemque etiam dicere. 
When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or 
cogs broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim 
the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, 
while the disorder continues, will continually betray its 
own infirmity. So when a man’s mind is disordered or his 
heart corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his 
language an expression corresponding to the irregularities 
within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as 
well as in the face. As physicians judge of the state of the 


62 



THE MORALITY IK WORDS. 


63 


body, so may we judge of the mind, by the tongue. Except 
under peculiar circumstances, where prudence, shame, or 
delicacy seals the mouth, the objects dearest to the heart,— 
the pet words, phrases, or shibboleths, the terms expressing 
our strongest appetencies and antipathies,— will rise most 
frequently to the lips; and Ben Jonson, therefore, did not 
exaggerate in saying that no glass renders a man’s form 
and likeness so true as his speech. “ As a man speaks, so 
he thinks; and as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” 

If a man is clear-headed, noble-minded, sincere, just, 
and pure in thought and feeling, these qualities will be 
symbolized in his words; and, on the other hand, if he 
has a confused habit of thought, is mean, grovelling and 
hypocritical, these characteristics will reveal themselves in 
his speech. The door keeper of an alien household said to 
Peter, “ Thou art surely a Galilean; thy speech bewrayeth 
thee ”; and so, in spite of all masks and professions, in 
spite of his reputation, the essential nature of every person 
will stamp itself on his language. How often do the words 
and tones of a professedly religious man, who gives lib¬ 
erally to the church, prays long and loud in public, and 
attends rigidly to every outward observance, betray in 
some mysterious way,— by some impalpable element which 
we instinctively detect, but cannot point out to others,— 
the utter worldliness of his character! How frequently do 
words uttered volubly, and with a pleasing elocution, affect 
us as mere sounds, suggesting only the hollowness and 
unreality of the speaker’s character! How often does the 
use of a single word flash more light upon a man’s motives 
and principles of action, give a deeper insight into his 
habits of thought and feeling, than an entire biography! 
How often, when a secret sorrow preys upon the heart, 


64 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


which we would fain hide from the world by a smiling 
face, do we betray it unconsciously by a trivial or paren¬ 
thetical word! Fast locked do we deem our Bluebeard 
chamber to be, the key and the secret of which we have in 
our own possession; yet all the time a crimson stream is 
flowing across the door sill, telling of murdered hopes 
within. 

Out of the immense magazine of words furnished by our 
English vocabulary,— embracing over a hundred thousand 
distinct terms,— each man selects his own favorite expres¬ 
sions, his own forms of syntax, by a peculiar law which is 
part of the essential difference between him and all other 
men; and in the verbal stock in trade of each individual 
we should find, could it once be laid open to us, a key that 
would unlock many of the deepest mysteries of his human¬ 
ity,—many of the profoundest secrets of his private history. 
How often is a man's character revealed by the adjectives 
he uses! Like the inscriptions on a thermometer, these 
words of themselves reveal the temperament. The con¬ 
scientious man weighs his words as in a hair-balance; the 
boaster and the enthusiast employ extreme phrases, as if 
there were no degree but the superlative. The cautious 
man uses words as the rifleman does bullets; he utters but 
few words, but they go to the mark like a gunshot, and 
then he is silent again, as if he were reloading. The dog¬ 
matist is known by his sweeping, emphatic language, and 
the absence of all qualifying terms, such as “ perhaps ” and 
“ it may be.” The fact that the word “ glory ” predomi¬ 
nates in all of Bonaparte’s dispatches, while in those of his 
great adversary, Wellington, which fill twelve enormous 
volumes, it never once occurs — not even after the hardest 
won victory,— but “ duty,” “ duty,” is invariably named as 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


65 


the motive for every action, speaks volumes touching their 
respective characters. It was to work out the problem of 
self-aggrandizement that Napoleon devoted all his colossal 
powers; and conscience , responsibility, and kindred terms, 
seem never to have found their way into his vocabulary. 
Men, with their physical and moral force, their bodily 
energies, and their passions, prejudices, delusions, and en¬ 
thusiasms, were to him but as fuel to swell the blaze on the 
altar of that ambition of which he was at once the priest 
and deity. Of duties to them he never for a moment 
dreamed; for, from the hot May-day of Lodi to the autum¬ 
nal night of Moscow, when he fled the flaming Kremlin, he 
seemed unconscious that he was himself a created and 
responsible being. 

An author’s style is an open window through which 
we can look in upon him, and estimate his character. The 
cunning reader reads between the lines, and finds out 
secrets about the writer, as if he were overhearing his 
soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase or epithet, draws 
conclusions from asseveration and emphasis, notes the half- 
perceptible sneer or insinuation, detects the secret misery 
that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s idiosyn¬ 
crasies even when he tries hardest to mask them. We 
know a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a 
Rembrandt or a Durer. Macaulay is betrayed by his 
antitheses, and Cicero by his esse videatur. 

Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of 
a historian by his style, his language being an infallible 
index to his character. “If it is very heavy and cum¬ 
brous, it indicates either a dull man or a pompous man, 
or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry and 
full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, the 


66 


words; their use and abuse. 


writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly anti¬ 
thetical and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways 
of stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected 
man. If it be plain and simple, always clear, but never 
eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible man, but is 
too hard and dry to be a very great man. If, on the 
other hand, it is always elegant, rich in illustrations, and 
without the relief of simple and great passages, we must 
admire the writer’s genius in a very high degree, but 
we may fear that he is too continually excited to have 
attained to the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily 
calm. In this manner the mere language of a historian 
will furnish us with something of a key to his mind, and 
will tell us, or at least give us cause to presume, in what 
his main strength lies, and in what he is deficient.” It 
has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in which 
it was impossible to speak the truth. 

A writer in the “ Edinburgh Review ” observes that the 
statement that a man’s language is part of his character, 
holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain 
shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but 
also in regard to a general vocabulary. “ There is a school 
vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases 
brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and 
passing now and then into general currency. In this age 
of examinations,— army, navy, civil-service, and middle- 
class,— the verb‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with 
the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries. 
The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so 
has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has 
his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the 
fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


67 


fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of 
nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’ 
The connoisseur in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in 
a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they 
had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite 
landscape may have ‘ tones ’ in it, as well as your violin. 
With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with cloth that is 
‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and 
observe jthat a painting is * broad.’ You sit down at dinner 
with a ‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table, 
and looking up see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or 
Wouvermans before you on the wall.” 

As with individuals, so with nations: the language of 
a people is often a moral barometer, which marks with 
marvellous precision the rise or fall of the national life. 
The stock of words composing any language corresponds 
to the knowledge of the community that speaks it, and 
shows with what objects it is familiar, what generalizations 
it has made, what distinctions it has drawn,— all its cog¬ 
nitions and reasonings, in the worlds of matter and of 
mind. “As our material condition varies, as our ways 
of life, our institutions, public and private, become other 
than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our 
language. In these days of railroads, steamboats and 
telegraphs, of sun pictures, of chemistry and geology, of 
improved wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, 
articles of food and luxury of every description, how 
many words and phrases are in every one’s mouth which 
would be utterly unintelligible to the most learned man 
of a century ago, were he to rise from his grave and walk 
our streets! . . . Language is expanded and contracted in 
precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those 


68 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every 
part, along with the enrichment or impoverishment 
of their minds.” * Every race has its own organic 
growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which 
are impressed on its political constitution, its legisla¬ 
tion, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious 
worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is 
found in its speech. If a people is, as Milton said of the 
English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingen¬ 
ious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtle to 
discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; 
while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low- 
thoughted,— if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all 
lofty sentiments,— its mockery of virtue, its inability to 
comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the 
feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably 
betray themselves in its speech, as truly as would the 
opposite qualities of spirituality of thought and exaltation 
of soul. These discreditable qualities will find an utter¬ 
ance “in the use of solemn and earnest words in senses 
comparatively trivial or even ridiculous; in the squander¬ 
ing of such as ought to have been reserved for the highest 
mysteries of the spiritual life, on slight and secular objects; 
and in the employment, almost in jest and play, of words 
implying the deepest moral guilt.” 

Could anything be more significant of the profound 
degradation of a people than the abject character of the 
complimentary and social dialect of the Italians, and the 
pompous appellations with which they dignify things in 
themselves insignificant, as well as their constant use of 
intensives and superlatives on the most trivial occasions? 

* “Language and the Study of Language,” by W. D. Whitney. 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


69 


Is it not a notable fact that they, who for so long a time 
had no country,— on whose altars the fires of patriotism 
have, till of late, burned so feebly,— use the word pelle- 
grino , “foreign,” as a synonym for “excellent”? Might 
we not almost infer a priori the servile condition to which, 
previous to their late uprising, centuries of tyranny had 
reduced them, from the fact that with the same people, so 
many of whom are clothed in rags, a man of honor is 
“a well dressed man”; that a man who murders in secret 
is “ a brave man,” bravo; that a virtuoso , or “virtuous man,” 
is one who is accomplished in music, painting, and sculpt¬ 
ure,— arts which should be the mere embroidery, and not 
the web and woof, of a nation’s life; that, in their mag¬ 
nificent indigence, they call a cottage with three or four 
acres of land un podere , “ a power ”; that they term every 
house with a large door an palazzo“ a palace,” a lamb’s fry 
ana cosa stupenda , “ a stupendous thing,” and that a message 
sent by a footman to his tailor through a scullion is ana 
ambasciata , “an embassy”? 

Let us not, however, infer the hopeless depravity of 
any people from the baseness of the tongue they have 
inherited, not chosen. It makes a vast difference, as Prof. 
Marsh justly observes, whether words expressive of noble 
thoughts and mighty truths do not exist in a language, 
or whether ages of soul-crushing tyranny have compelled 
their disuse, and the employment of the baser part of the 
national vocabulary. The mighty events that have lately 
taken place in Italy “ show that a tone of hypocrisy may 
cling to the tongue, long after the spirit of a nation is 
emancipated, and that where grand words are found in 
a speech, there grand thoughts, noble purposes, high 
resolves exist also; or, at least, the spark slumbers which 


70 words; their use and abuse. 

a favoring breath may, at any moment, kindle into a 
cherishing and devouring flame.” * 

A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French 
language, while it has such positive expressions as “drunk” 
and “ tipsy,” conveyed by ivre and gris , contains no such 
negative term as “sober.” Sobre means always “temper¬ 
ate” or “abstemious,” never the opposite condition to 
intoxication. The English, it is argued, drink enough to 
need a special illustrative title for a man who has not 
drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol 
freely during the sieges, the French have never yet felt 
the necessity of forming any such curious subjective ap¬ 
pellation, consequently they do not possess it. Again, the 
French boast that they have no such word as “ bribe,” as 
if this implied their exemption from that sin; and such, 
indeed, may be the fact. But may not the absence of this 
word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their 
lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offense, 
just as the lack of the word “ humility,” in the language of 
the Greeks, usually so rich in terms, proves that they 
lacked the thing itself, or as the fact that the same people 
had no word corresponding to the Latin ineptus, argues, 
as Cicero thought, not that the character designated by 
the word was wanting among them, but that the fault 
was so universal with them that they failed to recognize 
it as such? Is it not a great defect in a language that 
it lacks the words by which certain forms of baseness or 
sinfulness, in those who speak it, may be brought home 
to their consciousness? Can we properly hate or abhor 
any wicked act till we have given it a specific objective 
existence by giving it a name which shall at once desig- 


* “Lectures on the English Language. 


THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 


71 


nate and condemn it? The pot-de-vin, and other jesting 
phrases which the French have coined to denote bribery, 
can have no effect but to encourage this wrong. 

What shall we think of the fact that the French lan¬ 
guage has no word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not 
a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national 
character, that among thirty-seven millions of talkers, no 
provision, except the awkward paraphrase, celui qui ecoute, 
“ he who hears,” should have been made for hearers ? 
Is there any other explanation of this blank than the 
supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure 
love of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the 
proverb, he believes that silence is silver, but talking 
is golden; and that, not caring whether he is listened to 
or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for 
the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remark¬ 
able that, among the French, bonhomme, “a good man,” is 
a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word, 
“ gehenna,” has been condensed into gene , and means only 
a petty annoyance; and that honn&ete, which once meant 
honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter 
half of the reign of Louis XIY that the word honnete 
exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then, 
according to good authority, when a man’s descent was 
said to be honnete, he was complimented on the virtuous¬ 
ness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity 
of their condition; and when the same term was applied 
to his family, it was an acknowledgment that they be¬ 
longed to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion 
that they were plebeians. Again, how significant is the 
fact that the French has no such words as “home,” 
“ comfort,” “ spiritual,” and but one word for “ love ” and 


72 


words; their use and abuse. 


“like,” compelling them to put Heaven’s last gift to man 
on a par with an article of diet; as “I love Julia,’—“I 
love a leg of mutton”! Couple with these peculiarities 
of the language the circumstance that the French term 
spirituel means simply witty, with a certain quickness, 
delicacy, and versatility of mind, and have you not a real 
insight into the national character? 

It is said that the word oftenest on a Frenchman’s lips 
is la gloire , and next to that, perhaps, is brillant , “brilliant.” 
The utility of a feat or achievement in literature or science, 
in war or politics, surgery or mechanics, is of little moment 
in his eyes unless it also dazzles and excites surprise. It is 
said that Sir Astley Cooper, the great British surgeon, on 
visiting the French capital, was asked by the surgeon en 
chef of the empire how many times he had performed some 
feat of surgery that required a rare union of dexterity and 
nerve. He replied that he had performed the operation 
thirteen times. “Ah! but, Monsieur, I have performed 
him one hundred and sixty time. How many time did you 
save his life?” continued the curious Frenchman, as he 
saw the blank amazement of Sir Astley’s face. “ I,” said 
the Englishman, “saved eleven out of the thirteen. How 
many did you save out of a hundred and sixty?” “Ah! 
Monsieur, I lose dem all ; — but de operation was very 
brillant! ” 

The author of “ Pickwick ” tells us that in America the 
sign vocal for starting a coach, steamer, railway train, etc., 
is “Go Ahead!” while with John Bull the ritual form is 
“All Right!”—and he adds that these two expressions are 
somewhat expressive of the respective moods of the two 
nations. The two phrases are, indeed, vivid miniatures 
of John Bull and his restless brother, who sits on the 


THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 


73 


safety valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and rosin 
into his steam furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have 
entered the station, and who would hardly object to being 
fired off from a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there 
were one chance in fifty of getting sooner to the end of his 
journey. Let us hope that the day may yet come when 
our “two-forty” people will exchange a little of their fiery 
activity for a bit of Bull’s caution, and when our Yankee 
Herald’s College, if we ever have one, may declare “ All 
Right!” to be the motto of our political escutcheon, with 
as much propriety as it might now inscribe “Go Ahead!” 
beneath that fast fowl, the annexing and screaming eagle, 
that hovers over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, dips 
its wings in two oceans, and has one eye on Cuba and the 
other on Quebec. 

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the truth 
that the language of nations is a mirror, in which may 
be seen reflected with unerring accuracy all the elements 
of their intellectual as well as of their moral character. 
What scholar that is familiar with Greek and Latin has 
failed to remark how indelibly the contrariety of character 
in the two most civilized nations of antiquity is impressed 
on their languages, distinguished as is the one by exuberant 
originality, the other by innate poverty of thought? In 
the Greek, that most flexible and perfect of all the Euro¬ 
pean tongues, — which surpasses every other alike in its 
metaphysical subtlety, its wealth of inflections, and its 
capacity for rendering the minutest and most delicate 
shades of meaning,— the thought controls and shapes the 
language; while the tyrannous objectivity of the Latin, 
rigid and almost cruel, like the nation whose voice it is, 
and whose words are always Sic volo , sic jubeo , stet pro 


74 words; their use ahd abuse. 

ratione voluntas , coerces rather than simply syllables the 
thought. “ Greek,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “ the 
shifine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our 
race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of 
indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinct¬ 
ness of nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from 
which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like 
Italian, speaking to the mind like English; at once the 
variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and 
intensity of Aeschylus; not compressed to the closest by 
Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not 
sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its 
ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes him¬ 
self. And Latin, — the voice of Empire and of Law, of 
War and of the State, — the best language for the meas¬ 
ured research of History, and the indignant declamation 
of moral satire; rigid in its constructions, parsimonious 
in its synonyms; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive 
in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct 
with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of 
individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not 
the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and 
spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, 
by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and 
thoughtful Tacitus.” 

It is a noteworthy fact that, as the Romans were the 
most majestic of nations, so theirs is the only ancient 
language that contains the word “majesty,” the Greek hav¬ 
ing nothing that exactly corresponds to it; and the Latin 
language is as majestic as were the Romans themselves. 
Cicero, or some other Latin writer, finds an argument to 
show that the intellectual character of the Romans was 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


75 


higher than that of the Greeks, in the fact that the word 
convivium means “ a living together,” while the corre¬ 
sponding Greek term, <wfi7t6<rtov, means “a drinking togeth¬ 
er.” While the Romans retained their early simplicity and 
nobility of soul, their language was full of power and 
truth; but when they became luxurious, sensual, and cor¬ 
rupt, their words degenerated into miserable and meaning¬ 
less counters, without intrinsic value, and serving only as 
a conventional medium of exchange. It has been said 
truly that “ in the pedantry of Statius, in the puerility 
of Martial, in the conceits of Seneca, in the poets who 
would go into emulous raptures on the beauty of a lap- 
dog and the apotheosis of a eunuch’s hair, we read the 
hand-writing of an empire’s condemnation.” 

The climate of a country, as well as the mind and 
character of its people, is clearly revealed in its speech. 
The air men breathe, the temperature in which they live, 
and the natural scenery amid which they pass their lives, 
acting incessantly upon body and mind, and especially 
upon the organs of speech, impart to them a soft or a 
harsh expression. The languages of the South, as we 
should expect them to be, “are limpid, euphonic, and 
harmonious, as though they had received an impress from 
the transparency of their heaven, and the soft sweet sounds 
of the winds that sigh among the woods. On the other 
hand, in the hirrients and gutturals, the burr and rough¬ 
ness of the Northern tongues, we catch an echo of the 
breakers bursting on their crags, and the crashing of the 
pine branch over the cataract.” The idiom of Sybaris 
cannot be that of Sparta. The Attic Greek was softer than 
the Doric, the dialect of the mountains; the Ionic, spoken 
in the voluptuous regions of Asia Minor, was softer and 


76 


words; their use and abuse. 


more sinuous than the Attic. The Anglo-Saxon, the lan¬ 
guage of a people conversant chiefly with gloomy forests 
and stormy seas, and prone to silence, was naturally harsh 
and monosyllabic. The roving sea-king of Scandinavia, 
cradled on the ocean and rocked by its storms, could no 
more speak in the soft and melting accents of a Southern 
tongue than the screaming eagle could utter the liquid 
melody of a nightingale’s song. 

It is said that in the South Sea Islands version of the 
New Testament there are whole chapters with no words 
ending in consonants, except the proper names of the 
original. Italian has been called the love-talk of the 
Roman without his armor. Fuller, contrasting the Italians 
and the Swiss, quaintly remarks that the former, “ whose 
country is called ‘ the country of good words,’ love the 
circuits of courtesy, that an ambassador should not, as a 
sparrow hawk, fly outright to his prey, and meddle pres¬ 
ently with the matter in hand; but, like the noble falcon, 
mount in language, soar high, fetch compasses of compli¬ 
ment, and then in due time stoop to game, and seize on 
the business propounded. Clean contrary, the Switzers 
(who sent word to the king of France not to send them 
an ambassador with stores of words, but a treasurer with 
plenty of money) count all words quite out which are not 
straight on, have an antipathy against eloquent language, 
the flowers of rhetoric being as offensive to them as sweet 
perfume to such as are troubled with the mother; yea, 
generally, great soldiers have their stomachs sharp set to 
feed on the matter; loathing long speeches, as wherein 
they conceive themselves to lose time, in which they could 
conquer half a country; and, counting bluntness their best 
eloquence, love to be accosted in their own kind.” 


THE MORALITY Ilf WORDS. 


77 


It is in the idioms of a people, its peculiar turns of 
expression, and the modifications of meaning which its 
borrowed words have undergone, that its distinctive genius 
is most strikingly Seen. The forms of salutation used by 
different nations are saturated with their idiosyncrasies, 
and of themselves alone essentially reveal their respective 
characters. How clearly is the innermost distinction be¬ 
tween the Greek mind and the Hebrew brought out in 
their respective salutations, “Rejoice!” and “Peace!” How 
vividly are contrasted, in the two salutations, the sunny, 
world-enjoying temper of the one people with the profound 
religious feeling of the other! The formula of the robust, 
energetic, valiant Roman,— with whom virtue was manli¬ 
ness, and whose value was measured by his valor ,— was 
Salve ! Vale ! that is, “ Be well,” “ Be strong.” In the 
expression, “If God will it, you are well,” is betrayed the 
fatalism of the Arab; while the greeting of the Turk, 
“May your shadow never be less!” speaks of a sunny 
clime. In the hot, oppressive climate of Egypt perspiration 
is essential to health, and you are asked, “ How do you 
perspire?” The Italian asks, Come sta? literally, “How 
does he stand?” an expression originally referring to the 
standing of the Lombard merchants in the market place, 
and which seems to indicate that one’s well-being or health 
depends on his business prosperity. Some writers, how¬ 
ever, have regarded the word “ stand ” in this formula as 
meaning no more than “exist”; mere life itself, in the 
land of far niente, being a blessing. The Genoese, a 
trading people, and at one time the bankers of Europe, 
used in former days to say, Sanita e guadagno , or 
“Health and gain!” a phrase in which the ideals of the 
countrymen of Columbus are tersely summed up. The 


78 


words; their use and abuse. 


dreamy, meditative German, dwelling amid smoke and 
abstractions, salutes you with the vague, impersonal, 
metaphysical Wie gehts ?— “How goes it?” Another 
salutation which he uses is, Wie befinden sie sich ? — 
“ How do you find yourself? ” A born philosopher, he is 
so absent-minded, so lost in thought and clouds of tobacco 
smoke, that he thinks you cannot tell him of the state of 
your health till you have searched for and found it. 

The trading Hollander, who scours the world, asks, 
Hoe vaart's-ge? “How do you go?” an expression emi¬ 
nently characteristic of a trading, travelling people, 
devoted to business, and devoid of sentiment. The 
thoughtful Swede inquires, “ How do you think?” They 
also inquire, Hur mar ni? —literally “How can you?” 
that is, “Are you strong?” The lively, restless, viva¬ 
cious Frenchman, who lives in other people’s eyes, and 
is more anxious about appearances than about realities, 
— who has never to hunt himself up like the German, 
and desires less to do, like the Anglo-Saxon, than to be 
lively, to show himself,— says frankly, Comment vous 
portez-vous ?—“How do you carry yourself?” In these 
few words we have the pith and essence, the very soul, 
of the French character. Externals, the shapes and 
shows of things,— for what else could we expect a peo¬ 
ple to be solicitous, who are born actors, and who live, 
to a great extent, for stage effect; who unite so much 
outward refinement with so much inward coarseness; 
who have an exquisite taste for the ornamental, and an 
almost savage ignorance of the comfortable; who invented, 
as Emerson says, the dickey, but left it to the English to 
add the shirt ? It has been said that a man would be 
owl-blind, who in the “ Hoo’s a’ wi’ ye ” of the kindly 


THE MORALITY IN' WORDS. 


79 


Scot, could not perceive the mixture of national pawki- 
ness with hospitable cordiality. “ One sees, in the mind’s 
eye, the canny chield, who would invite you to dinner 
three days in the week, but who would look twice at 
your bill before he discounted it.” What can be more 
unmistakably characteristic than the Irish peasant’s 
“Long life to your honor; may you make your bed in 
glory!” After such a grandiose salute, we need no 
mouser among the records of antiquity to certify to us 
that the Hibernian is of Oriental origin, nor do we need 
any other key to his peculiar vivacity and impression¬ 
ableness of feeling, his rollicking, daredevil, hyperbole- 
loving enthusiasm. Finally, of all the national forms 
of salutation, the most signally characteristic,— the one 
which reveals the very core, the inmost “ heart of heart” 
of a people,— is the Englishman’s “How do you do?” In 
these four little monosyllables the activity, the intense 
practicality of the Englishman, the very quintessence of 
his character, are revealed as by a lightning’s flash. To 
do! Not to think, to stand, to carry yourself, but to do; 
and this doing is so universal among the English,— its 
necessity is so completely recognized,— that no one 
dreams of asking whether you are doing, or what you 
are doing, but all demand, “ How do you do? ” 

It has been well observed by the learned German 
writer, J. D. Michaelis, that “ some virtues are more sed¬ 
ulously cultivated by moralists, when the language has 
fit names for indicating them; whereas they are but 
superficially treated of, or rather neglected, in nations 
where such virtues have not so much as a name. Lan¬ 
guages may obviously do injury to morals and religion by 
their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from 


80 


words; their use and abuse. 


the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a strik¬ 
ing fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native 
language of Van Dieman’s Land has four words to 
express the idea of taking life, not one of which indi¬ 
cates the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to 
murder; while any word for love is wanting to it alto¬ 
gether. One of the most formidable obstacles which 
Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the 
doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has 
been the absence from their languages of a spiritual and 
ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the religious 
teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or ethical 
sj^stem inculcating virtues and addressed to faculties, 
whose very existence their language, and consequently 
the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recog¬ 
nize. Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have 
no name by which they can be described and denounced, 
as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in trans¬ 
lating the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the 
translators have been compelled to employ merely provis¬ 
ional phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to 
convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that 
the Ethiopians, having but one word for “ person ” and 
“ nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union 
of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are 
languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not 
easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca 
wrote a treatise on “ Providence,” which had not even a 
name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious 
fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to 
express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in 
terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about 


THE MORALITY IIST WORDS. 


81 


two centuries ago no word for “ selfishness,” the root of 
all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks 
and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but 
the Christian idea of “ sin ” was utterly unknown to the 
Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed 
energy of the will, by which it yielded to the allure¬ 
ments of sensual pleasure; and virtue, literally “manli¬ 
ness,” was the determined spirit, the courage and vigor 
with which it resisted such temptations. But the idea 
of “ holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter 
strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been 
impossible to express them in either of the classical 
tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strikingly 
observed, man knew well that he could “irritate” God or 
“ a god,” but not that he could “ offend ” him. The words 
“crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those of 
“ sin ” and “ sinner ” belong only to the Christian tongue. 
For a similar reason, man could always call God “ Father,” 
which expresses only a relation of creation and of power; 
but no man, of his own strength, could say “ my Father ”! 
for this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai, 
and which belongs only to Calvary. 

Again, the Greek language, as we have already seen, 
had no term for the Christian virtue of “humility”; and 
when the apostle Paul coined one for it, he had to em¬ 
ploy a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement 
before a just and holy God, but of positive debasement 
and meanness of spirit. On the other hand, there is a 
word in our own tongue which, as De Quincey observes, 
cannot be rendered adequately either by German or Greek, 
the two richest of human languages, and without which 
we should all be disarmed for one great case, continually 
6 


82 


words; their use and abuse. 


recurrent, of social enormity. It is the word “ humbug. 1 ’ 
“A vast mass of villany, that cannot otherwise he reached 
by legal penalties, or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, 
would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not 
through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous 
and inexorable word.” 

There is no way in which men so often become the 
victims of error as by an imperfect understanding of cer¬ 
tain words which are artfully used by their superiors. 
Cynicism, is seldom shallower than when it sneers at what 
it contemptuously calls the power of words over the popu¬ 
lar imagination. If men are agreed about things, what, 
it is asked, can be more foolish than to dispute about 
names? But while it is true that in the physical world 
things dominate over names, and are not at the mercy 
of a shifting vocabulary, yet in the world of ideas,— of 
history, philosophy, ethics and poetry,— words triumph 
over things, are even equivalent to things, and are as 
truly the living organism of thought as the eyes, lips, 
and entire physiognomy of a man, are the media of the 
soul’s expression. Hence words are the only certain test 
of thought; so much so that we often stop in the midst 
of an assertion, an exclamation, or a request, startled by 
the form it assumes in words. Thus, in Shakespeare, 
King John says to Hubert, who pleaded his sovereign’s 
order for putting the young prince to death, that if, 
instead of receiving the order in signs, 

“ Thou 

Hadst bid me tell my tale in express words , 

Deep shame had struck me dumb.” 

Words are often not only the vehicle of thought, but the 
very mirror in which we see our ideas, and behold the 
beauty or ugliness of our inner selves. 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


83 


A volume might be written on the mutual influence 
of language and opinion, showing that as 

“ Faults in the life breed errors in the brain, 

And these reciprocally those again,” 

so the sentiments we cherish mould our language, and 
our words react upon our opinions and feelings. Let a 
man go into a foreign country, give up his own language, 
and adopt another, and he will gradually and uncon¬ 
sciously change his opinions, too. He will neither be 
able to express his old ideas adequately in the new words, 
nor to prevent the new words of themselves putting new 
ideas in his brain. Who has failed to notice that the 
opinion we entertain of an object does not more power¬ 
fully influence the mind in applying to it a name or an 
epithet, than the epithet or name influences the opinion? 
Call thunder “the bolt of God’s wrath,” and you awaken 
a feeling of terror; call it, with the German peasant, das 
Hebe gewitter , “ the dear thunder,” and you excite a differ¬ 
ent emotion. As the forms in which we clothe the out¬ 
ward expression of our feelings react with mighty force 
upon the heart, so our speculative opinions are greatly 
confirmed or invalidated by the technical terms we employ. 
Fiery words, it has been truly said, are the hot blast 
that inflames the fuel of our passionate nature; and formu¬ 
lated doctrine, a hedge that confines the discursive wander¬ 
ings of the thoughts. In personal quarrels, it is the 
stimulus men give themselves by stinging words that 
impels them to violent deeds; and in argumentative dis¬ 
cussions it is the positive affirmation and reaffirmation of 
our views which, more than the reasons we give, deepen 
our convictions. The words that have helped us to con¬ 
quer the truth often become the very tyrants of our con- 


84 


words; their use and abuse. 


victions; and phrases once big with meaning are repeated 
till they “ ossify the very organs of intelligence.” False 
or partial definitions often lead into dangerous errors; 
an impassioned polemic falls a victim to his own logic, 
and a wily advocate becomes the dupe of his own rhetoric. 

Words, in short, are excellent servants, but the most 
tyrannical of masters. Some men command them, but a 
vast majority are commanded by them. There are words 
which have exercised a more iron rule, swayed with a more 
despotic power, than Caesar or the Russian Czar. Often an 
idle word has conquered a host of facts; and a mistaken 
theory, embalmed in a widely received word, has retarded 
for centuries the progress of knowledge. Thus the pro¬ 
tracted opposition in France to the Newtonian theory arose 
chiefly from the influence of the word “attraction”; the 
contemptuous misnomer, “ Gothic,” applied to northern 
mediaeval architecture, perpetuated the dislike with which 
it was regarded; and the introduction of the term “landed 
proprietor ” into Bengal caused a disorganization of society 
which had never been caused by its most barbarous in¬ 
vaders. 

Macaulay, in his “ History of England,” mentions a cir¬ 
cumstance strikingly illustrative of the connection between 
language and opinion, — that no large society of which the 
language is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and 
that wherever a language derived from ancient Rome is 
spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails. 
“ Men believe,” says Bacon, “ that their reason is lord over 
their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a 
reciprocal and reactionary power over the intellect. . . 
Words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the under¬ 
standing of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


85 


the judgment.” Not only every language, but every age, 
lias its charmed words, its necromantic terms, which give 
to the cunning speaker who knows how to ring the changes 
upon them, instant access to the hearts of men, as at “Open 
Sesame!” the doors of the cave flung themselves open to 
the thieves, in the Arabian tale. “ There are words,” says 
Balzac, “ which, like the trumpets, cymbals and bass drums 
of mountebanks, attract the public; the words ‘ beauty,’ 
‘ glory,’ ‘ poetry,’ have witcheries that seduce the grossest 
minds.” At the utterance of the magic names of Auster- 
litz and Marengo, thousands have rushed to a forlorn hope, 
and met death at the cannon’s mouth. 

When Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusa¬ 
lem was exhibited in London in 1820, Mrs. Siddons, the 
famous actress, entering the exhibition room, said: “The 
paleness of your Christ gives it a supernatural look.” This, 
says the painter, settled its success. There is great value 
in the selection of terms; many a man’s fortune has been 
made by a happy phrase. Thousands thronged to see the 
great work with “ a supernatural look.” 

South, in his eloquent sermons on “ The Fatal Impos¬ 
ture and Force of Words,” observes that any one who 
wishes to manage “ the rabble,” need never inquire, so 
long as they have ears to hear, whether they have any 
understanding whereby to judge. With two or three 
popular, empty words, well tuned and humored, he may 
whistle them backward and forward, upward and down¬ 
ward, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he 
is so. When Caesar’s army mutinied, no argument from 
interest or reason could persuade them; but upon his 
addressing them as Quirites , the tumult was instantly 
hushed, and they took that word in payment of all. “ In 


86 


words; their use and abuse. 


the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah we find some arrived at that 
pitch of sottishness, and so much in love with their own 
ruin, as to own plainly, and roundly say, what they would 
be at. In the tenth verse, ‘ Prophesy not unto us,’ say 
they, ‘ right things, but prophesy to us smooth things.’ As 
if they had said, ‘Do but oil the razor for us, and let us 
alone to cut our own throats.’ Such an enchantment is 
there in words; and so fine a thing does it seem to some 
to be ruined plausibly, and to be ushered to destruction 
with panegyric and acclamation; a shameful, though irre¬ 
fragable argument of the absurd empire and usurpation of 
words over things; and that the greatest affairs and most 
important interests of the world are carried on by things, 
not as they are, but as they are called.” 

The Romans, after the expulsion of Tarquin, could not 
brook the idea of being governed by a king ; yet they 
submitted to the most abject slavery under an emperor. 
Cromwell was too sagacious to disgust the republicans by 
calling himself King, though he doubtless laughed grimly 
in his sleeve as, under the title of Lord Protector, he 
exercised all the regal functions. We are told by Saint 
Simon that at the court of the grand monarch, Louis XIY, 
gambling was so common that even the ladies took part 
in it. The gentlemen did not scruple to cheat at cards; 
but the ladies had a peculiar tenderness on the subject. 
No lady could for a moment think of retaining such 
unrighteous gains; the moment they were touched, they 
were religiously given away. But then, we must add, the 
gift was always made to some other winner of her own sex. 
By carefully avoiding the words “ interchange of winnings,” 
the charming casuists avoided all self-reproach, and all 
sharp censure by* their discreet and lenient confessors. 


THE MORALITY IN’ WORDS. 


87 


There are sects of Christians at the present day that protest 
vehemently against a hired ministry; yet their preachers 
must be warmed, fed and clothed by “donation parties”; 
reminding one of the snob gentleman in Moliere, whose 
father was no shop-keeper, but kindly “ chose goods ” for his 
friends, which he let them have for — money. 

Party and sectarian leaders know that the great secret 
of the art of swaying the people is to invent a good shib¬ 
boleth or battle cry, to be dinned continually in their 
ears. Persons familiar with British history will remember 
certain talismanic vocables, such as “ Wilkes and Liberty,” 
the bare utterance of which has been sufficient at times 
to set a whole population in a flame; while the solemn 
and sepulchral cadences in which Pitt repeated the cuckoo 
song of “ thrones and altars,” “ anarchy and dissolution 
of social order,” were more potent arguments against 
revolution than the most perfect syllogism that was ever 
constructed in mood and figure. So in our own country 
this verbal magic has been found more convincing than 
arguments in “Barbara” or “ Baralipton.” Patriots and 
demagogues alike have found that it was only necessary, 
in South’s phrase, to take any passion of the people, when 
it was predominant and just at the critical height of it, 
“and nick it with some lucky or unlucky word,” and they 
might “as certainly overrule it to their own purpose as 
a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder, will infallibly 
blow it up.” “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” “No 
More Compromise,” “The Higher Law,” “The Irrepress¬ 
ible Conflict,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” and other similar 
phrases, have roused and moved the public mind as much 
as the pulpit and the press. 

Gouverneur Morris, in his Parisian 'journal of 1789, 


88 


words; their use and abuse. 


tells an anecdote which strikingly illustrates this influence 
of catch-words upon the popular mind. A gentleman, in 
walking, came near to a knot of people whom a street 
orator was haranguing on the power of a qualified veto 
{veto suspensif ), which the constituent assembly had just 
granted to the king. “ Messieurs,” said the orator, “ we 
have not a supply of bread. Let me tell you the reason. 
It has been but three days since the king obtained this 
qualified veto, and during that time the aristocrats have 
bought up some of these suspensions , and carried the grain 
out of the kingdom.” To this profound discourse the 
people assented by loud cheers. Not only shibboleths, 
but epithets, are often more convincing than syllogisms. 
The term Utopian or Quixotic , associated in the minds of 
the people with any measure, even the wisest and most 
practicable, is as fatal to it as what some one calls the 
poisonous sting of the American (?) humbug. 

So in theology; false doctrines and true doctrines have 
owed their currency or non-currency, in a great measure, 
to the coinage of happy terms, by which they have been 
summed up and made attractive or offensive. Trench 
observes that “ the entire secret of Buddhism is in the 
‘ Nirvana.’ Take away the word, and it is not too much to 
say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone.” When 
the Roman Catholic Church coined the term “ transubstan- 
tiation,” the error which had so long been held in solution 
was precipitated, and became henceforth a fixed and influ¬ 
ential dogma. What a potent watchword was the term 
“Reformation,” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! 
Who can estimate the influence of the phrases “ Broad 
Church,” “Liberal Church,” “Close Communion,” in ad¬ 
vancing or retarding the growth of certain religious sects 


THE MORALITY IH WORDS. 


89 


at this day? Many of even the most “advanced think¬ 
ers,” who reject the supernatural element of the Bible, 
put all religions upon the same level, and deem Shake¬ 
speare as truly inspired as the Apostles, style themselves 
“ Christians.” 

Even in science happy names have had much to do with 
the general reception of truth. “ Hardly any original 
thoughts on mental or social subjects,” says a writer, 
“ever make their way among mankind, or assume their 
proper proportions even in the minds of their inventors, 
until aptly selected words or phrases have, as it were, 
nailed them down and held them fast.” How much is 
the study of the beautiful science of botany hindered by 
such “ lexical superfetations ” as chrysanthemum leukan- 
tliemum, Myosotis scorpioeicles, —“ scorpion-shaped mouse’s 
ear”; and how much is that of astronomy promoted 
by such popular terms as “the bear,” “the serpent,” 
“the milky way”! How much knowledge is gath¬ 
ered up in the compact and easily remembered phrase, 
“correlation of forces”; and to what an extent the wide 
diffusion of Darwin’s speculations is owing to two or 
three felicitous and comprehensive terms, such as “ the 
struggle for existence,” “ survival of the fittest,” “ the pro¬ 
cess of natural selection”! Who that has felt the pain¬ 
fulness of doubt has not desired to know something of 
“the positive philosophy” of Comte? On the other hand, 
the welhknown anatomist, Professor Owen, complains 
with just reason of the embarrassments produced in his 
science by having to use a long description instead of a 
name. Thus a particular bone is called by Soemmering 
u pars occipitalis stride sic dicta partis occipitalis ossis 


90 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


spheno-occipitalis ,” a description so clumsy that only the 
direst necessity would lead one to use it. 

Even great authors, who are supposed to have “sov¬ 
ereign sway and masterdom” over words, are often be¬ 
witched and led captive by them. Thus Southey, Cole¬ 
ridge and Wordsworth were bent on establishing their 
Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, not be¬ 
cause they knew anything of that locality, but because 
Susquehanna was “such a pretty name” Again, to point 
an epigram or give edge to a sarcasm, a writer will stab 
a rising reputation as with a poniard; and, even when 
convicted of misrepresentation, will sooner stick to the 
lie than part with a jeu d'esprit, or forego a verbal felic¬ 
ity. Thus Byron, alluding to Keats’s death, which was 
supposed to have been caused by Gifford’s savage criticism 
in the “Quarterly,” said: 

“ Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle, 

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!” 

Though he was afterward informed of the untruth of 
these lines, Byron, plethoric as he was with poetic wealth 
and wit, could not willingly let them die; and so the witti¬ 
cism yet remains to mislead and provoke the laughter of 
his readers. 

Again, there are authors who, to meet the necessities 
of rhyme, or to give music to a period, will pad out their 
sentences with meaningless expletives. They employ 
words as carpenters put false windows into houses; not to 
let in light upon their meaning, but for symmetry. Or, 
perhaps, they imagine that a certain degree of distension 
of the intellectual stomach is required to enable it to act 
with its full powers,—just as some of the Russian peas¬ 
antry mix sawdust with the train oil they drink, or as 


THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 


91 


hay and straw, as well as corn, are given to horses, to 
supply the necessary bulk. Thus Dr. Johnson, imitating 
Juvenal, says: 

“Let observation, with extensive view, 

Survey mankind from China to Peru.” 

This, a lynx-eyed critic contended, was equivalent to say¬ 
ing: “Let observation, with extensive observation, observe 
mankind extensively.” If the Spartans, as we are told, 
fined a citizen because he used three words where two 
would have done as well, how would they have punished 
such prodigality of language? 

It is an impressive truth which has often been noticed 
by moralists, that indulgence in verbal vice speedily leads 
to corresponding vices in conduct. If a man talk of any 
mean, sensual, or criminal practice in a familiar or flip¬ 
pant tone, the delicacy of his moral sense is almost sure 
to be lessened, he loses his horror of the vice, and, when 
tempted to do the deed, he is far more likely to yield. 
Many a man, without dreaming of such a result, has thus 
talked himself into vice, into sensuality, and even into 
ruin. The apostle James was so impressed with the 
significance of speech that he regarded it as an unerr¬ 
ing sign of character. “ If any man offend not in word,” 
he declares, “ the same is a perfect man, and able also to 
bridle the whole body.” Again he declares that “the 
tongue is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison”; com¬ 
menting upon which, Rev. F. W. Robertson observes: 
“ The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is 
known; there are poisons so destructive that a single drop 
insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds. 
. . . In that drop of venom which distils from the sting 
of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, 


92 


words; their use and abuse. 


there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so 
subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet 
so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole 
constitution, and convert night and day into restless 
misery.” So, he adds, there are words of calumny and 
slander, apparently insignificant, yet so venomous and 
deadly that they not only inflame hearts and fever human 
existence, but poison human society at the very fountain 
springs of life. It was said with the deepest feeling of 
the utterers of such words, by one who had smarted 
under their sting: “Adders 1 poison is under their lips.” 

Who can estimate the amount of misery which has 
been produced in society by merely idle words, uttered 
without malice, and by words uttered in jest? A poet, 
whose name is unknown to us, has vividly painted the 
effects of such utterances: 

“A frivolous word, a sharp retort, 

A flash from a passing cloud, 

Two hearts are scathed to their inmost core. 

Are ashes and dust forevermore; 

Two faces turn to the crowd, 

Masked by pride with a lifelong lie, 

To hide the scars of that agony. 

“ A frivolous word, a sharp retort, 

An arrow at random sped; 

It has cut in twain the mystic tie 
That had bound two souls in harmony, 

Sweet love lies bleeding or dead. 

A poisoned shaft, with scarce an aim, 

Has done a mischief sad as shame.'” 

How often have thoughtless words set empires ablaze, 
and kindled furious wars among nations! It was one of 
the virtues of George Washington that he knew how to 
be silent. John Adams said he had the most remarkable 
mouth he had ever seen; for he had the art of control¬ 
ling his lips One of the rules of conduct to which David 


THE MORALITY IK WORDS. 


93 


Hume inflexibly adhered, was never to reply to any attack 
made upon him or his writings. It was creditable to him 
that he had no anxiety to have “the last word,”—that 
which in family circles has been pronounced to be “the 
most dangerous of infernal machines.” 

It is not, however, in the realm of literature and morals 
only that the power of words is seen. Who is ignorant of 
their sway in the world of politics? Is not fluency of 
speech, in many communities, more than statesmanship? 
Are not brains, with a little tongue, often far less potent 
than “ tongue with a garnish of brains”? Need any one 
be told that a talent for speech-making has stood in place 
of all other acquirements; that it is this which has made 
judges without law, and diplomatists without French; 
which has sent to the army brigadiers who knew not a 
cannon from a mortar, and to the legislature men who 
could not tell a bank note from a bill of exchange; which, 
according to Macaulay, made a Foreign Minister of Mr. Pitt, 
who never opened Yattel, and which was near making a 
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not 
work a sum in long division? “To be a man of the world,” 
says Corporal Bunting, a character in one of Bulwer’s 
novels, “you must know all the ins and outs of speech¬ 
ifying. It’s words that make another man’s mare go your 
road. Augh! that must have been a clever man as invented 
language. It is a marvel to think how much a man does 
in the way of cheating, if he only has the gift of the gab; 
wants a missus,— talks her over; wants your horse,— talks 
you out of it; wants a place,—talks himself into it. . . 
Words make even them ’ere authors, poor creatures, in 
every man’s mouth. Augh! sir, take note of the words, 
and the things will take care of themselves.” 


94 


words; their use and abuse. 


It is true that “ lying words ” are not always responsible 
for the mischief they do; that they often rebel and growl 
audibly against the service into which they are pressed, and 
testify against their taskmasters. The latent nature of a 
man struggles often through his own words, so that even 
truth itself comes blasted from his lips, and vulgarity, 
malignity, and littleness of soul, however anxiously cloaked, 
are betrayed by the very phrases and images of their 
opposites. “A Satanic drop in the blood,” it has been said, 
“makes a clergyman preach diabolism from scriptural 
texts, and a philanthropist thunder hate from the rostrum 
of reform.” * But though the truth often leaks out 
through the most hypocritical words, it is yet. true that 
they are successfully employed, as decoy ducks, to deceive, 
and the dupes who are cheated by them are legion. There 
are men fond of abstractions, whom words seem to enter 
and take possession of, as their lords and owners. Blind 
to every shape but a shadow, deaf to every sound but an 
echo, they invert the legitimate order, and regard things 
as the symbols of words, not words as the S3 T mbols of 
things. There is, in short, “ a besotting intoxication which 
this verbal magic, if I may so call it, brings upon the mind 
of man. . . Words are able to persuade men out of what 
they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, 
and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in 
spite of nature and experience.” t 

All who are familiar with Dickens will recollect the 
reply of the shrewd Samuel Weller, when asked the mean¬ 
ing of the word monomania: “When a poor fellow takes 
a piece of goods from a shop, it is called theft; but if a 

♦“Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple. 

t South’s Sermons. 


THE MORALITY IX WORDS. 


95 


wealthy lady does the same thing, it is called monomania .” 
There is biting satire as well as naivete and dry humor 
in the reply, and it strikingly shows the moral power of 
language; how the same act may be made to appear in 
wholly different lights, according to the phraseology used to 
describe it. The same character may be made to look as 
spotless as an angel, or as black as “the sooty spirits that 
troop under Acheron’s flag,” through the lubricity of lan¬ 
guage. “ Timidus ,” says Seneca, “ se cautum vocat ; sordidus 
parcum." Thousands who would shrink back with disgust 
or horror from a vice which has an ugly name, are led 
“first to endure, then pity, then embrace,” when men have 
thrown over it the mantle of an honorable appellation. 
A singular but most instructive dictionary might be com¬ 
piled by taking one after another the honorable and the 
sacred words of a language, and showing for what infamies, 
basenesses, crimes, or follies, each has been made a pretext. 
Is there no meaning in the fact that, among the ancient 
Romans, the same word was employed to designate a crime 
and a great action, and that a softened expression for “a 
thief” was “a man of three letters” (f. u. r.)? Does it 
make no difference in our estimate of the gambler and his 
profession, whether we call him by the plain, unvarnished 
Saxon “ blackleg,” or by the French epithet, “ industrious 
chevalier”? Can any one doubt that in Italy, when poison¬ 
ing was rifest, the crime was fearfully increased by the fact 
that, in place of this term, not to be breathed in ears 
polite, the death of some one was said to be “assisted”? 
Or can any one doubt the moral effect of a similar perver¬ 
sion of words in France, when a subtle poison, by which 
impatient heirs delivered themselves from persons who 


96 


words; their use and abuse. 


stood between them and the inheritance they coveted, was 
called “succession powder”? 

Juvenal indignantly denounces the polished Romans for 
relieving the consciences of rich criminals by softening the 
names of their crimes; and Thucydides, in a well known 
passage of his history, tells how the morals of the Greeks 
of his day were sapped, and how they concealed the 
national deterioration, by perversions of the customary 
meanings of words. Unreasoning rashness, he says, passed 
as “manliness” and esprit de corps , and prudent caution 
for specious cowardice; sobermindedness was a mere “cloak 
for effeminacy,” and general prudence was “ inefficient 
inertness.” The Athenians, at one time, were adepts in 
the art of coining agreeable names for disagreeable things. 
“Taxes” they called “subscriptions,” or “ contributions ”; 
the prison was “the house”; the executioner a “public 
servant”; and a general abolition of debt was “a dis¬ 
burdening ordinance.” Devices like these are common to 
all countries; and in our own, especially, one is startled 
to see what an amount of ingenuity has been expended 
in perfecting this “ devil’s vocabulary,” and how successful 
the press has been in its efforts to transmute acts of 
wickedness into mere peccadilloes, and to empty words 
employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and 
earnestness of the moral reprobation they convey. 

The use of classical names for vices has done no little 
harm to the public morals. We may say of these names, 
what Burke said with doubtful correctness of vices them¬ 
selves, that “ they lose half their deformity by losing all 
their grossness.” If any person is in doubt about the moral 
quality of an act, let him characterize it in plain Saxon, 
and he will see it in its true colors. 


THE MORALITY IX WORDS. 


97 


Some time ago a Wisconsin clergyman, being detected 
in stealing books from a bookstore, confessed the truth, 
and added that he left bis former home in New Jersey 
under disgrace for a similar theft. This fact a New York 
paper noted under the head of “ A Peculiar Misfortune.” 
About the same time a clerk in Richmond, Va., being sent 
to deposit several hundreds of dollars in a bank, ran 
away with the money to the North. Having been pursued, 
overtaken, and compelled to return the money, he was 
spoken of by “ the chivalry ” as the young man “ who had 
lately met with an accident .” Is it not an alarming sign 
of the times, when, in the legislature of one of our largest 
eastern States, a member declares that he has been asked 
by another member for his vote, and told that he would 
get “ five hundred reasons for giving it ”; thus making 
the highest word in our language, that which signifies 
divinely given power of discrimination and choice, the 
synonym of bribery ? 

Perhaps no honorable term in the language has been 
more debased than “ gentleman.” Originally the word 
meant a man born of a noble family, or gens, as the 
Romans called it; but as such persons were usually 
possessed of wealth and leisure, they were generally dis¬ 
tinguished by greater refinement of manners than the 
working classes, and a more tasteful dress. As in the 
course of ages their riches and legal privileges diminished, 
and the gulf which separated them from the citizens of the 
trading towns was bridged by the increasing wealth and 
power of the latter, the term “ gentleman ” came at last to 
denote indiscriminately all persons who kept up the state 
and observed the social forms which had once characterized 
men of rank. To-day the term has sunk so low that the 
7 


98 


words; their use and abuse. 


acutest lexicographer would be puzzled to tell its meaning. 
Not only does every person of decent exterior and deport¬ 
ment assume to be a gentleman, but the term is applied 
to the vilest criminals and the most contemptible mis¬ 
creants. as well as to the poorest and most illiterate 
persons in the community. 

In aristocratic England the artificial distinctions of 
society have so far disappeared that even the porter who 
lounges in his big chair, and condescends to show you 
out, is the “gentleman in the hall”; Jeames is the “gen¬ 
tleman in uniform”; while the valet is the “gentleman’s 
gentleman.” Even a half a century ago, George IV, who 
was so ignorant that he could hardly spell, and who in 
heart and soul was a thorough snob, was pronounced, upon 
the ground of his grand and suave manners, “ the first 
gentleman of Europe.” But in the United States the term 
has been so emptied of its original meaning,—especially 
in some of the southern states, where society has hardly 
emerged from a feudal state, and where men who shoot 
each other in a street fray still babble of being “ born 
gentlemen,” and of “dying like gentlemen,”—that most 
persons will think it is quite time for the abolition of that 
heartless conventionality, that pretentious cheat and bar¬ 
barian, the gentleman. Cowper declared, a hundred years 
ago, in regard to duelling: 

“A gentleman 

Will not insult me, and no other can.” 

A southern newspaper stated some years ago that a “ gen¬ 
tleman ” was praising the town of Woodville, Mississippi, 
and remarked that “ it was the most quiet, peaceable place 
he ever saw; there was no quarrelling or rowdyism, no 
fighting about the streets. If a gentleman insulted an- 


THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 


99 


other, he was quietly shot down , and there was the last of 
it.” The gentle Isaiah Rynders, who acted as marshal at 
the time the pirate Hicks was executed in New York, 
had doubtless similar notions of gentility; for, after con¬ 
versing a moment with the culprit, he said to the by¬ 
standers: “I asked the gentleman if he desired to address 
the audience, but he declined.” In a similar spirit Booth, 
the assassin of Lincoln, when he was surrounded in the 
barn, where he was shot like a beast, offered to pledge his 
word “ as a gentleman ,” to come out and try to shoot one 
or two of his captors. When the Duke of Saxe-Weimar 
visited the United States about fifty years ago, he was 
asked by a hackman: “ Are you the man that’s going to 
ride with me; for I am the gentleman that’s to drive?” 

When a young man becomes a reckless spendthrift, 
how easy it is to gloss over his folly by talking of his 
“ generosity,” his “ big-heartedness,” and “ contempt for 
trifles”; or, if he runs into the opposite vice of miserly 
meanness, how convenient to dignify it by the terms 
“ economy ” and “ wise forecast of the future ”! Many a 
man has blown out another’s brains in “ an affair of 
honor,” who, if accused of murder, would have started 
back with horror. Many a person stakes his all on a 
public stock, or sells wheat or corn which he does not 
possess, in the expectation of a speedy fall, who would be 
thunderstruck if told that, while considering himself only 
a shrewd speculator, he is, in everything save decency 
of appearance, on a par with the haunter of a “ hell,” 
and as much a gambler as if he were staking his money 
on rouge-et-noir or roulette. Hundreds of officials have 
been tempted to defraud the government by the fact 
that the harshest term applied to the offence is the 



100 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


rose-water one, “defaulting”; and men have plotted with¬ 
out compunction the downfall of the government, and 
plundered its treasury, as “ secessionists,” who would have 
expected to dangle at the rope’s end, or to be shot down 
like dogs, had they regarded themselves as rebels or 
traitors. So Pistol objected to the odious word “steal,”— 
“ convey the wise it call.” There are multitudes of persons 
who can sit for hours at a festive table, gorging them¬ 
selves, Gargantua-like, “ with links and chitterlings,” and 
guzzling whole bottles of champagne, under the impression 
that they are “jolly fellows,” “true epicureans,” and “ con¬ 
noisseurs in good living,” whose cheeks would tingle with 
indignation and shame if they were accused, in point- 
blank terms, of vices so disgusting as intemperance or 
gluttony. “ I am not a slut,” boasts Audrey, in “As You 
Like It,” “ though I thank the gods I am foul.” 

Of all classes of men whose callings tempt them to 
juggle with words, none better than auctioneers under¬ 
stand how much significance lies in certain shades of 
expression. It is told of Robins, the famous London auc¬ 
tioneer, who in selling his wares revelled in an oriental 
luxury of expression, that in puffing an estate he described 
a certain ancient gallows as a “ hanging wood.” At 
another time, having made the beauties of the earthly 
paradise which he was commissioned to sell too gorgeously 
enchanting, and finding it necessary to blur it by a fault 
or two, lest it should prove “ too good for human nature’s 
daily food,” the Hafiz of the mart paused a moment, and 
reluctantly added: “But candor compels me to add, gen¬ 
tlemen, that there are two drawbacks to this splendid 
property,— the Utter of the rose leaves and the noise of the 
nightingales .” 


THE MORALITY IN WORDS. 


101 


It is hardly possible to estimate the mischief which is 
done to society by the debasement of its language in the 
various ways we have indicated. When the only words 
we have by which to designate the personifications of 
nobleness, manliness, courtesy and truth are systemat¬ 
ically applied to all that is contemptible and vile, who 
can doubt that these high qualities themselves will ulti¬ 
mately share in the debasement to which their proper 
names are subjected? Who does not see how vast a dif¬ 
ference it must make in our estimate of any species of 
wickedness, whether we are wont to designate it, and to 
hear it designated, by some word which brings out its 
hatefulness, or by one which palliates and glosses over its 
foulness and deformity? How much better to character¬ 
ize an ugly thing by an ugly word, that expresses moral 
condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of some 
coarseness, than to call evil good and good evil, to put 
darkness for light, and light for darkness, by the use of 
a term that throws a veil of sentiment over a sin! In 
reading the literature of former days, we are shocked 
occasionally by the bluntness and plain speaking of our 
fathers; but even their coarsest terms,— the “naked 
words, stript from their shirts,”—in which they de¬ 
nounced libertinism, were far less hurtful than the cere¬ 
monious delicacy which has taught men to abuse each 
other with the utmost politeness, to hide the loathsome¬ 
ness of vice, and to express the most indecent ideas in 
the most modest terms. 

It has been justly said that the corrupter of a language 
stabs straight at the very heart of his country. He com¬ 
mits a crime against every individual of a nation, for he 
poisons a stream from which all must drink; and the 


102 


words; their use and abuse. 


poison is more subtle and more dangerous, because more 
likely to escape detection, than the deadliest venom with 
which the destructive philosophy of our day is assailing 
the moral or the religious interests of humanity. “ Let 
the words of a country,” says Milton in a letter to an 
Italian scholar, “ be in part unhandsome and offensive in 
themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, 
and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that 
the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly 
yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any 
amount of servility?” 

Sometimes the spirit which governs employers or em¬ 
ployed, and other classes of men, in their mutual relations, 
is indicated by the names they give each other. Some 
years ago the legislature of Massachusetts made a law 
requiring that children of a certain age, employed in the 
factories of that State, should be sent to school a certain 
number of weeks in the year. While visiting the facto¬ 
ries to ascertain whether this wise provision of the State 
government was complied with, an officer of the State 
inquired of the agent of one of the principal factories at 
New Bedford, whether it was the custom to do anything 
for the physical, intellectual, or moral welfare of the 
work people. The reply would not have been inappropri¬ 
ate from the master of a plantation, or the captain of a 
coolie ship: “We never do; as for myself, I regard my 
work people as I regard my machinery. . . They must 
look out for themselves , as I do for myself. When my 
machinery gets old and useless, I reject it and get new; 
and these people are a part of my machinery.” Another 
agent in another part of the State replied to a similar 
question, that “he used his mil) hands as he used his horse ; 


THE MORALITY IU WORDS. 


103 


as long as the horse was in good condition and rendered 
good service, he treated him well; otherwise he got rid of 
him as soon as he could, and what became of him after¬ 
ward was no affair of his.” 

But we need not multiply illustrations to show the 
moral power of words. As the eloquent James Martineau 
says: “Power they certainly have. They are alive with 
sweetness, with terror, with pity. They have eyes to look 
at you with strangeness or with response. They are even 
creative, and can wrap a world in darkness for us, or flood 
it with light. But in all this, they are not signs of the 
weakness of humanity: they are the very crown and blos¬ 
som of its supreme strength; and the poet whom this faith 
possesses will, to the end of time, be master of the critic 
whom it deserts. The whole inner life of men moulds the 
forms of language, and is moulded by them in turn; and 
as surely pines when they are rudely treated as the plant 
whose vessels you bruise or try to replace with artificial 
tubes. The grouping of thought, the musical scale of 
feeling, the shading and harmonies of color in the spec¬ 
trum of imagination, have all been building, as it were, 
the molecules of speech into their service; and if you heed¬ 
lessly alter its dispositions, pulverize its crystals, fix its 
elastic media, and turn its transparent into opaque, you 
not only disturb expression, you dislodge the very things 
to be expressed. And in proportion as the idea or senti¬ 
ment thus turned adrift is less of a mere personal char¬ 
acteristic, and has been gathering and shaping its elements 
from ages of various affection and experience, does it be¬ 
come less possible to replace it by any equivalents, or 
dispense with its function by any act of will.” 

To conclude: there is one startling fact connected with 


104 


AVORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


words, which should make all men ponder what they utter. 
Not only is every wise and every idle word recorded in the 
book of divine remembrance, but modern science has shown 
that they produce an abiding impression on the globe we 
inhabit. Plunge your hand into the sea, and you raise its 
level, however imperceptibly, at the other side of the 
globe. In like manner, the pulsations of the air, once set 
in motion, never cease; its Avaves, raised by each sound, 
.travel the entire round of earth’s and ocean’s surface; and 
in less than twenty-four hours, every atom of atmosphere 
takes up the altered movement resulting from that sound. 
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are 
written in imperishable characters all that man has spoken, 
or even whispered. Not a word that goes from the lips 
into the air can ever die, until the atmosphere which 
wraps our huge globe in its embrace has passed away for¬ 
ever, and the heavens are no more. There, till the heav¬ 
ens are rolled together as a scroll, will still live the jests 
of the profane, the curses of the ungodly, the scoffs of the 
atheist, “ keeping company with the hours,” and circling 
the earth with the song of Miriam, the wailing of Jere¬ 
miah, the low prayer of Stephen, the thunders of Demos¬ 
thenes, and the denunciations of Burke. 

“Words are mighty, words are living; 

Serpents, with their venomous stings, 

Or, bright angels, crowding round us 
With heaven’s light upon their wings; 

Every word has its own spirit, 

True or false, that never dies; 

Every word man’s lips have uttered 
Echoes in God’s skies.” 


CHAPTER III. 


GRAND WORDS. 

The fool hath planted his memory with an army of words.— Shakespeare. 

In the commerce of speech use only coin of gold and silver. . . Be pro¬ 
found with clear terms, and not with obscure terms.— Joubert. 

The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be dis¬ 
posed to keep Ollendorff in the background; the proper result of such ac¬ 
quirements is visible in a finer ear for words.— T. W. Higginson. 

Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. 
Don’t whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want to tingle.—H. 
W. Beecher. 

TT is a trite remark that words are the representatives 
of things and thoughts, as coin represents wealth. 
You carry in your pocket a doubloon or a dollar, stamped 
by the king or state, and you are the virtual owner of 
whatever it will purchase. But who affixes the stamp 
upon a word? Ho prince or potentate was ever strong 
enough to make or unmake a single word. Caesar con¬ 
fessed that with all his power he could not do it, and 
Claudius could not introduce even a new letter. He 
attempted to introduce the consonant V, as distinct from 
U, the Roman alphabet having but one character for both; 
but he could not make his subjects accept the new letter, 
though he could kill or plunder them at pleasure. Cicero 
tried his hand at word-coining; but though he proved 
a skilful mint-master, and struck some admirable trial 
pieces, which were absolutely needed to facilitate mental 
exchanges, yet they did not gain circulation, and were 
thrown back upon his hands. But that which defied the 
power of Caesar and of Cicero does not transcend the 

105 


106 words; their use and abuse. 

ability of many writers of our own day, some of whom 
are adepts in the art of word-coining, and are daily mint¬ 
ing terms and phrases which must make even Noah 
Webster, boundless as was his charity for new words, 
turn in his grave. It is doubtful, however, whether these 
persons do so much damage to our noble English language 
as those who vulgarize it by the use of penny-a-liner 
phrases. There is a large and growing class of speakers 
and writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who, apparently 
despising the homely but terse and telling words of their 
mother tongue, never use a Saxon term, if they can find 
what Lord Brougham calls a “ long-tailed word in 'osity or 
’ation ” to do its work. 

What is the cause of this? Is it the extraordinary, not 
to say excessive, attention now given by persons of all ages 
to foreign languages, to the neglect of our own? Is it the 
comparative inattention given to correct diction by the 
teachers in the schools of to-day; or is it because the 
favorite books of the young are sensational stories, made 
pungent, and, in a sense, natural, through the lavish use of 
all the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of low life? Shall 
we believe that it is because there is little individuality 
and independence in these days, that the words of so few 
persons are flavored with their idiosyncrasies; that it is 
from conscious poverty of thought that they try to trick 
out their ideas in glittering words and phrases, just as, by 
means of liigli-heeled boots, a laced coat, and a long 
feather, a fellow with a little soul and a weak body might 
try to pass muster as a bold grenadier? Or is it because 
of the prevalent mania for the sensational,— the craving 
for novelty and excitement, which is almost universal in 
these days,— that so many persons make sense subservient 


GRAND WORDS. 


107 


to sound, and avoid calling things by their proper names? 
Or, finally, to take a more charitable view of the case, 
is it because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit 
the exact truth, and describe a thing just as they have 
seen it,— to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures 
and proportions, and define a sensation as it was felt? 
Was Talleyrand wrong when he said that language was 
given to man to conceal his thought; and was it really 
given to hide his want of thought? Is it, indeed, the main 
object of expression to convey the smallest possible amount 
of meaning with the greatest possible amount of appear¬ 
ance of meaning; and, since nobody can be “so wise as 
Thurlow looked,” to look as wise as Thurlow while utter¬ 
ing the veriest truisms? 

Be all this as it may, in nothing else is the lack of 
simplicity, which is so characteristic of our times, more 
marked than in the prevailing forms of expression. “ The 
curse and the peril of language in our day, and partic¬ 
ularly in this country,” says an American critic, who 
may, perhaps, croak at times, but who has done much 
good service as a literary policeman in the repression of 
verbal licentiousness, “ is that it is at the mercy of men 
who, instead of being content to use it well, according 
to their honest ignorance, use it ill, according to their 
affected knowledge; who, being vulgar, would seem ele¬ 
gant; who, being empty, would seem full; who make up 
in pretence what they lack in reality; and whose little 
thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire¬ 
crackers in an empty barrel.” In the estimation of many 
writers at the present day, the great, crowning vice in 
the use of words is, apparently, to employ plain, straight¬ 
forward English. The simple Saxon is not good enough 


108 


words: their use and abuse. 


for their purposes, and so they array their ideas in “ big, 
dictionary words,” derived from the Latin, and load their 
style with expletives as tasteless as the streamers of 
tattered finery that flutter about the person of a dilapi¬ 
dated belle. The “ high polite,” in short, is their favorite 
style, and the good old Spartan rule of calling a spade 
a spade they hold in thorough contempt. Their great 
recipe for elegant or powerful writing is to call the most 
common things by the most uncommon names. Provided 
that a word is out-of-the-way,, unusual, or far-fetched,— 
and especially if it is one of many syllables,— they care 
little whether it is apt and fit or not. 

With them a fire is always “ the devouring element,” 
or a “ conflagration ”; and the last term is often used 
where there is no meeting of flames, as when a town is 
fired in several places, but when only one building is 
burned; the fire never burns a house, but it always “con¬ 
sumes an edifice,” unless it is got under, in which case 
“ its progress is arrested.” A railroad accident is always 
“a holocaust,” and its victims are named under the “death 
roll.” A man who is the first to do a thing “ takes the 
initiative.” Instead of loving a woman, a man “ becomes 
attached” to her; instead of losing his mother by death, 
he “ sustains a bereavement of his maternal relative.” A 
dog’s tail, in the pages of these writers, is his “ caudal 
appendage”; a dog breaker, “a kunopaedist ”; and a fish¬ 
pond they call by no less lofty a title than “piscine pre¬ 
serve.” Ladies, in their classic pages, have ceased to be 
married, like those poor, vulgar creatures, their grand¬ 
mothers; they are “led to the hymeneal altar.” Of 
the existence of such persons as a man, a woman, a boy, 
or a girl, these writers are profoundly ignorant; though 


GKAiq-D WORDS. 


109 


they often speak of “individuals,” “gentlemen,” “char¬ 
acters,” and “ parties,” and often recognize the existence 
of “juveniles” and “juvenile members of the commu¬ 
nity.” “ Individual ” is another piece of pompous inanity 
which is very current now. In “ Guesses at Truth ” 
mention is made of a celebrated preacher, who was so 
destitute of all feeling for decorum in language, as to 
call our Saviour “ this eminent individual .” “ Individual ” 

is a good Latin word, and serves a good purpose when it 
distinguishes a person from a people or class, as it served 
a good purpose in the scholastic philosophy; but would 
Cicero or Duns Scotus have called a great man an eminens 
individuum ? These “ individuals,” strange to say, are 
never dressed, but always “attired”; they never take off 
their clothes, but “ divest themselves of their habiliments,” 
which is so much grander. 

“In the church,” says St. Paul, “I had rather speak 
five words with my understanding, that by my voice I 
might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an 
unknown tongue.” Not so think' some of the preachers of 
the Gospel of the present day, if we may judge them by 
the language they use in their discourses. To give their 
sermons a philosophical air, or because simple language is 
not to their taste, they invest their discourses with the 
technicalities of science and philosophy. They never speak 
of so old-fashioned a thing as the will, but always of 
“volition”; duty, with them, is never duty simply, but 
always “moral obligation”; and their sermons abound in 
“ necessary relations,” “ moral and physical necessities,” 
“ intellectual processes,” “laws of nature,” and “arguments 
a priori and a posteriori .” It was a preacher of this class, 
who having occasion to tell his hearers that there was 


110 words; their use and abuse. 

not one Gospel for the rich and another for the poor, 
informed them that, “if they would not be saved on 
‘ general principles,’ they could not be saved at all.” Who 
can doubt that such language as this is not only poorly 
understood, if understood it is, by the ordinary hearer, 
but is far less effective than the simple Saxon words which 
might be used to convey the same ideas? Some years ago 
a white minister preached in a plain, direct style to a 
church of negroes in the South, whose “ colored ” pastor 
was greatly addicted to the use of high-flown language 
in his sermons. In the season of exhortation and prayer 
that followed, an old negro thanked the Lord for the 
various blessings of the Sabbath and the sanctuary, and 
especially, he added, “ we thank Thee that to-day we have 
been fed from a low crib." Would it not be well for 
preachers generally to remember that many of Christ’s 
flock are “ little ones,” whose necks are short, and that they 
may consequently starve, if their food, however nutritious, 
is placed in too lofty a crib? 

But preachers are not the only anti-Saxons of our day; 
we may find them in nearly all the classes of society,— 
persons who never tell us that a man is asleep, but say 
that he is “ locked in slumber”; who deem it vulgar, and 
perhaps cruel, to say that a criminal was hanged, but very 
elegant to say that he was “ launched into eternity.” A 
person of their acquaintance never does so low a thing 
as to break his leg; he “fractures his limb.” They 
never see a man fall; but sometimes see “an individual 
precipitated.” Our Latin friends,— fortunate souls,— never 
have their feelings hurt, though it must be confessed that 
their “sensibilities” are sometimes dreadfully “lacerated.” 
Above the necessities of their poor fellow-creatures, they 


GRAND WORDS. 


Ill 


never do so vulgar a thing as to eat a meal; they always 
“partake of a repast,” which is so much more elegant. 
They never do so commonplace a thing as to take a walk; 
they “make a pedestrian excursion.” A conjurer with 
them is a “ prestidigitator ”; a fortune-teller, a“vaticina- 
tor.” As Pascal says, they mask all nature. There is with 
them no king, but an “august monarch”; no Paris, but 
a “capital of a kingdom.” Even our barbers have got 
upon stilts. They no longer sell tooth-powder and shaving- 
soap, like the old fogies, their fathers, but “ odonto,” and 
“dentifrice,” and “rypophagon”; and they themselves, 
from the barber-ous persons they once were, have been 
transformed into “artists in hair.” The medical faculty, 
too, have caught the spirit of the age. Who would suspect 
that “epistaxis” means simply bleeding at the nose, and 
“emollient cataplasm” only a poultice? Fancy one school¬ 
boy doubling up his fist at another, and telling him to 
look out for epistaxis! Who would dream that “anheidro- 
hepseterion ” (advertised in the London “ Times ”) means 
only a saucepan, or “taxidermist” a bird-stuffer? Is it 
not remarkable that tradesmen have ceased “ sending in ” 
their “ little bills,” and now only “ render their accounts ”? 

“ There are people,” says Landor, “ who think they 
write and speak finely, merely because they have forgot¬ 
ten the language in which their fathers and mothers used 
to talk to them.” As in dress, deportment, etc., so in 
language, the dread of vulgarity, as Whately has suggested, 
constantly besetting those who are half conscious that they 
are in danger of it, drives them into the opposite extreme 
of affected finery. They act upon the advice of Boileau: 

“Quoiqne vous ecriviez, evitez la bassesse; 

Le style le moins noble a pourtant sa noblesse;” 


112 


words; their use and abuse. 


and, to avoid the undignified, according to them, it is only 
necessary not to call things by their right names. Hence 
the use of “residence” for house, “electric fluid” for 
lightning, “recently deceased” for lately dead, “encomium” 
for praise, “location” for place, “locate” for put, “lower 
limb” for leg, “sacred edifice” for church, “attired” for 
clad,— all of which have so learned an air, and are pre¬ 
ferred to the simpler words for the same reason, appar¬ 
ently, that led Mr. Samuel Weller, when writing his 
famous valentine to Mary, to prefer “ circumscribed ” to 
“ circumwented,” as having a deeper meaning. 

Such persons forget that glass will obstruct the light 
quite as much when beautifully painted as when discolored 
with dirt; and that a style studded with far-fetched epi¬ 
thets and high-sounding phrases may be as dark as one 
abounding in colloquial vulgarisms. Who does not sym¬ 
pathize with the indignation of Dr. Johnson, when, taking 
up at the house of a country friend a so called “ Liberal 
Translation of the New Testament,” he read, in the 
eleventh chapter of John, instead of the simple and touch¬ 
ing words, “Jesus wept,”—“Jesus, the Saviour of the 
world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears”? 
“ Puppy /” exclaimed the critic, as he threw down the 
book in a rage; and had the author been present, John¬ 
son would doubtless have thrown it at his head. Yet 
the great literary bashaw, while he had an eagle’s eye 
for the faults of others, was unconscious of his own sins 
against simplicity, and, though he spoke like a wit, too 
often wrote like a pedant. He had, in fact, a dialect 
of his own, which has been wittily styled Johnsonese. 
Goldsmith hit him in a vulnerable spot when he said: 
“Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, 


GRAND WORDS. 


113 


you would make them talk like whales.” The faults of 
his pompous, swelling diction, in which the frivolity of 
a coxcomb is described in the same rolling periods and 
with the same gravity of antithesis with which he would 
thunder against rebellion and fanaticism, are hardly exag¬ 
gerated by a wit of his own time who calls it 

“A turgid style, 

Which gives to an inch the importance of a mile; 

Uplifts the club of Hercules — for what? 

To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat; 

Bids ocean labor with tremendous roar, 

To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore; 

Sets wheels on wheels in motion,—what a clatter 1 
To force up one poor nipperkin of water; 

Alike in every theme his pompous art, 

Heaven's awful thunder, or a rumbling cart.” 

One of the latest “ modern improvements ” in speech 
is the substitution of “ lady ” and “ female ” for the good 
old English “ woman.” On the front of Cooper’s Reading 
Room, in the city of New York, is the sign in golden 
letters, “ Male and Female Reading Rooms.” Suppose 
Scott, in his noble tribute to women for their devotion 
and tenderness to men in their hour of suffering, had 
sung 

“Oh, ladies, in our hours of ease,” etc., 

would not the lines have been far more touching? An 
English writer says truly that the law of euphemisms is 
somewhat capricious; “one cannot always tell which words 
are decent and which are not. . . It really seems as if the 
old-fashioned feminine of ‘ man ’ were fast getting pro¬ 
scribed. We, undiscerning male creatures that we are, 
might have thought that * woman ’ was a more elegant and 
more distinctive title than ‘female.’ We read only the 
other day a report of a lecture on the poet Crabbe, in 
which she who was afterward Mrs. Crabbe was spoken of 


114 


words; their use and abuse. 


as ‘a female to whom he had formed an attachment.’ To 
us, indeed, it seems that a man’s wife should be spoken of 
in some way which is not equally applicable to a ewe lamb 
or a favorite mare. But it was a ‘female’ who delivered 
the lecture, and we suppose the females know best about 
their own affairs.” 

Can any person account for the apparent antipathy 
which many writers and speakers have to the good Saxon 
verb “to begin”? Ninety-nine out of every hundred per¬ 
sons one talks with are sure to prefer the French words 
“ to commence ” and “ to essay,” and the tendency is strong 
to prefer “ to inaugurate ” to either. Nothing in our day 
is begun, not even dinner; it is “inaugurated with soup.” 
In their fondness for the French words, many persons are 
betrayed into solecisms. Forgetting, or not knowing, that, 
while “ to begin ” may be followed by an infinitive or a 
gerund, “ to commence” is transitive, and must be followed 
by a noun or its equivalent, they talk of “ commencing to 
do ” a thing, “ essaying to do well,” etc. Persons who 
think that “ begin ” is not stately enough, or that it is even 
vulgar, would do well to look into the pages of Milton and 
Shakespeare. With all his fondness for Romanic words, 
the former hardly once uses “commence” and “commence¬ 
ment ”; and the latter is not only content with the idiom¬ 
atic word, but even shortens it, as in the well known line 
that depicts so vividly the guilt-wasted soul of Macbeth: 

“I ’gin to grow a-weary of the sun.” 


What a shock would every right-minded reader receive if, 
upon opening his Bible, he should find, in place of the old 
familiar words, the following: “In the commencement God 
created the heavens and the earth,” — “ The fear of the 


GRAND WORDS. 


115 


Lord is the commencement of wisdom ! ” Well did Coleridge 
say: “ Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from 
being vulgar in point of style.” “ Commence ” is a good 
word enough, but, being of outlandish origin, should never 
take the place of “begin,” except for the sake of rhythm 
or variety. 

Another of these grand words is “ imbroglio.” It is 
from the Italian, and means an intricate or complicated 
plot. Why, then, should a quarrel in the Cabinet at Wash¬ 
ington, or a prospective quarrel with France or England, 
be called an “ imbroglio”? Again, will any one explain to 
us the meaning of “ interpellation,” so often used by the 
correspondents of our daily newspapers? The word prop¬ 
erly means an interruption; yet when an opposition mem¬ 
ber of the French or Italian Parliament asks a question 
of a minister, he is said “ to put an interpellation.” Why 
should an army be said to be “ decimated,” without regard 
to the number or nature of its losses? The original mean¬ 
ing of this term was grave, and often terrible; it meant 
no less than taking the tenth of a man’s substance, or 
shooting every tenth man in a mutinous regiment, the 
victims being called out by lot. “ This appalling charac¬ 
ter of decimation lay in the likelihood that innocent per¬ 
sons, slain in cold blood, might suffer for the guilty. But 
the peculiar horror vanishes when we alter the conditions; 
and a regiment which has taken part in a hard-fought 
battle, and comes off the field only decimated,— that is to 
say, with nine living and unscathed for each man left on 
the field,—might be accounted rather fortunate than the 
reverse.” Why, again, should “donate” be preferred to 
“give”? Does it show a larger soul, a more magnificent 
liberality, to “donate” than to give? Must we “donate 


116 


words; their use and abuse. 


the devil his due,” when we would be unusually charita¬ 
ble? Why should “ elect” be preferred to “choose,” when 
there is no election whatever; or why is “balance” pref¬ 
erable to “ remainder ” ? As a writer has well said : 
“ Would any man in his senses dare to quote King David 
as saying: ‘They are full of children, and leave the balance 
of their substance unto their babes’? or read, ‘Surely the 
wrath of man shall praise thee: the balance of wrath thou 
shalt restrain,’ where the translators of our Bible wrote 
‘the remainder’? And if any one went into the nursery, 
and telling that tale of perennial interest of the little boys 
that ‘ a-sliding went, a-sliding went, a-sliding went, all on a 
summer’s day,’ should, after recounting how ‘ they all fell 
in, they all fell in, they all fell in,’ add ‘ the balance ran 
away,’ would there not go up a chorus of tiny but indig¬ 
nant protests against this mutilation, which would enlist 
a far wider sympathy than some of the proposed changes 
in the texts of classic authors, which have set editors and 
commentators at loggerheads? ” 

Again, why should one say “ rendition ” for perform¬ 
ance, “enactment” for acting, or “nude” for naked? In 
the seventeenth century, certain fanatics in England ran 
about without clothes, crying: “ We are the naked Truth.” 
Had they lived in this age of refinement, instead of shock¬ 
ing their countrymen with such indelicate expressions, they 
would have said, “We are Verity in a nude condition”; 
and had any person clothed them, he would have been 
said to have “ rehabilitated ” them. More offensive than 
any of these grandiose words is “ intoxicated ” in place of 
“drunk,” which it has nearly banished. A man can be 
intoxicated only when he has lost his wits' not by 
quantity, but by quality,— by drinking liquor that has 


GRAND WORDS. 


117 


been drugged. “Intoxicated,” however, has five syllables; 
drunk has but one; so the former carries the day by five 
to one. No doubt nine-tenths of those who drink to 
excess in this country, are, in fact, intoxicated, or poisoned; 
still, the two words should not be confounded. “Ovation” 
is a word often used incorrectly, as when an emperor, 
empress, king or queen, on making a triumphal entry 
into the capital of a state amid great popular enthusiasm, 
is said to receive an “ ovation,” though such an honor is 
distinctively reserved for meritorious subjects of the ruler. 
Sometimes we find a word of Latin origin used in a sense 
precisely opposite to the true one, as when “culminate,” 
which can be applied only to something which has reached 
the limit of its possible height, is used regarding the 
career of some wrong-doer, which is said to “culminate” 
in the lowest depths of degradation. 

Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the 
sun; and this itching for pompous forms of expression, 
this contempt for plainness and simplicity of style, is as 
old as Aristotle. In the third book of his “ Rhetoric,” dis¬ 
cussing the causes of frigidity of style, he speaks of one 
Alcidamas, a writer of that time, as “employing orna¬ 
ments, not as seasonings to discourse, but as if they were 
the only food to live upon. He does not say ‘ sweat,’ but 
‘the humid sweat’; a man goes not to the Isthmian games, 
but to ‘the collected assembly of the Isthmian solemnity’; 
laws are ‘the legitimate kings of commonwealths’; and 
a race, ‘ the incursive impulse of the soul.’ A rich man 
is not bountiful, but the ‘ artificer of universal largess.’ ” 
Is it not curious that our modern Quicklys and Malaprops, 
who often pride themselves upon their taste for swelling 
words and phrases, and their skill in using them, should 


118 


words; their use and abuse. 


have been anticipated by Alcidamas two thousand years 
ago? 

The abuse of the queen’s English, to which w r e have 
called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began 
with our transatlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” 
terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. In 
“Harrison’s Chronicle” we are told that after the Norman 
conquest “the English tongue grew into such contempt 
at court that most men thought it no small dishonor to 
speak any English there; which bravery took his hold at 
the last likewise in the country with every ploughman, that 
even the very carters began to wax weary of their mother 
tongue, and labored to speak French, which was then 
counted no small token of gentility.” 

The English people of to-day are quite as much addicted 
to the grandiose style as the Americans. Gough, in one of 
his lectures, speaks of a card which he saw in London, in 
which a man called himself “ Illuminating Artist to Her 
Majesty,” the fact being that he lighted the gas lamps near 
the palace. Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, 
complained in a recent lecture that our language had few 
friends and many foes, its only friends being ploughboys 
and a few scholars. The pleasant old “ inns ” of England, 
he said, had disappeared, their places being supplied by 
“hotels,” or “establishments”; while the landlord had 
made way for the “ lessee of the establishment.” A gentle¬ 
man going into a shop in Regent street to buy half-mourn¬ 
ing goods was referred by the shopman to “ the mitigated 
affliction department.” The besetting sin of some of the 
ablest British writers of this century is their lack of sim¬ 
plicity of language. Sydney Smith said of Sir James 
Mackintosh, that if he were asked for a definition of “ pep- 


GRAND WORDS. 


119 


per ,’ 1 he would reply thus: “Pepper may philosophically 
be described as a dusty and highly pulverized seed of an 
oriental fruit; an article rather of condiment than diet, 
which, dispersed lightly over the surface of food, with no 
other rule than the caprice of the consumer, communicates 
pleasure, rather than affords nutrition; and by adding a 
tropical flavor to the gross and succulent viands of the 
North, approximates the different regions of the earth, 
explains the objects of commerce, and justifies the indus¬ 
try of man.” 

Francis Jeffrey, the celebrated critic, had, even in con¬ 
versation, an artificial style and language, which were fit 
only for books and a small circle of learned friends. His 
diction and pronunciation, it is said, were unintelligible to 
the mass of his countrymen, and in the House of Commons 
offensive and ridiculous. An anecdote told in illustration 
of this peculiarity strikingly shows the superiority of sim¬ 
ple to high-flown language in the practical business of life. 
In a trial, which turned upon the intellectual competency 
of a testator, Jeffrey asked a witness, a plain countryman, 
whether the testator was “ a man of intellectual capacity,” 
—“an intelligent, shrewd man,”—“a man of capacity?” 
“Had he ordinary mental endowments?” “What d’ye 
mean, sir?” asked the witness. “I mean,” replied Jeffrey, 
testily, “ was the man of sufficient ordinary intelligence to 
qualify him to manage his own affairs?” “I dinna ken,” 
replied the chafed and mystified witness,— “Wad ye say 
the question ower again, sir?” Jeffrey being baffled, 
Cockburn took up the examination. He said: “Ye ken¬ 
ned Tammas-?” “ Ou, ay; I kenned Tammas weel; 

me and him herded together when we were laddies [boys].” 
“Was there onything in the cretur?” “De’il a thing but 



120 


words; their use and abuse. 


what the spune [spoon] put into him.” “ Would you have 
trusted him to sell a cow for you?” “A cow! I wadna 
lippened [trusted] him to sell a calf.” Had Jeffrey devoted 
a review article to the subject, he could not have given a 
more vivid idea of the testator’s incapacity to manage his 
own affairs. 

Our readers need not be told how much Carlyle has 
done to teutonize our language with his “ yardlongtailed ” 
German compounds. It was a just stroke of criticism 
when a New York auctioneer introduced a miscellaneous 
lot of books to a crowd with the remark: “ Gentlemen, of 
this lot I need only say, six volumes are by Thomas Car¬ 
lyle; the seventh is written in the English language.” 
Some years ago, a learned doctor of divinity and uni¬ 
versity professor in Canada wrote a work in which, wish¬ 
ing to state the simple fact that the “ rude Indian ” had 
learned the use of firing, he delivered himself as follows: 
“ He had made slave of the heaven-born element, the 
brother of the lightning, the grand alchemist and artif¬ 
icer of all times, though as yet he knew not all the worth 
or magical power that was in him. By his means the 
sturdy oak, which flung abroad its stalwart arms and 
waved its leafy honors defiant in the forest, was made to 
bow to the behest of the simple aborigines.” As the plain 
Scotchwoman said of I)e Quincey, “ the bodie has an awfu’ 
sicht o’ words!” This style of speaking and writing has 
become so common that it can no longer be considered 
wholly vulgar. It is gradually working upward; it is 
making its way into official writings and grave octavos; 
and is even spoken with unction in pulpits and senates. 
Metaphysicians are wont to define words as the signs of 
ideas; but with many persons, they appear to be, not so 


GRAND WORDS. 


121 


much the signs of their thought, as the signs of the signs 
of their thought. Such, doubtless, was the case with the 
Scotch clergyman, whom a bonneted abhorrer of legal 
preaching was overheard eulogizing: “Man, John, wasna 
yon preachin’!— yon’s something for a body to come awa 
wi’. The way that he smashed down his text into so mOny 
heads and particulars, just a’ to flinders! Nine heads and 
twenty particulars in ilka head — and sic monthfu's o’ 
grand ivords! —an’ every ane o’ them fu’ o’ meaning, if 
we but kent them. We hae ill improved our opportu¬ 
nities; man, if we could just mind onything he said, it 
would do us guid.” 

The whole literature of notices, handbills, and adver¬ 
tisements, in our day, has apparently declared “ war to 
the knife” against every trace of the Angles, Jutes and 
Saxons. We have no schoolmasters now; they are all 
“principals of collegiate institutes”; no copy-books, but 
“specimens of caligraphy”; no ink, but “ writing fluid ”; 
no physical exercise, but “ calisthenics ” or “ gymnastics.” 
A man who opens a groggery at some corner for the grat¬ 
ification of drunkards, instead of announcing his enter¬ 
prise by its real name, modestly proclaims through the 
daily papers that his “ saloon ” has been fitted up for the 
reception of customers. Even the learned architects of 
log cabins and pioneer cottages can find names for them 
only in the sonorous dialects of oriental climes. Time was 
when a farmhouse was a farmhouse and a porch a porch; 
but now the one is a “ villa ” or “ hacienda,” and the other 
nothing less than a “veranda.” In short, this genteel slang 
pursues us from the cradle to the grave. In old times, 
when our fathers and mothers died, they were placed in 
coffins, and buried in the graveyard or burying ground; 


122 words; their use and abuse. 

now, when an unfortunate “party” or “individual” “de¬ 
ceases ” or “ becomes defunct,” lie is deposited in a “ burial 
casket ” and “ interred in a cemetery.” It matters not 
that the good old words “ grave ” and “ graveyard ” have 
been set in the pure amber of the English classics,— that 
the Bible says, “ There is no wisdom in the grave,” “ Cruel 
as the grave,” etc. How much more pompous and magnilo¬ 
quent the Greek: “There is no wisdom in the cemetery,” 
“ Cruel as the cemetery!” 

Seriously, let us eschew all these vulgar fineries of 
style, as we would eschew the fineries of a dandy. Their 
legitimate effect is to barbarize our language, and to de¬ 
stroy all the peculiar power, distinctiveness, and appro¬ 
priateness of its terms. Words that are rarely used will 
at last inevitably disappear; and thus, if not speedily 
checked, this grandiloquence of expression will do an irre¬ 
parable injury to our dear old English tongue. Poetry 
may for a while escape the effects of this vulgar cox¬ 
combry, because it is the farthest out of the reach of such 
contagion; but, as prose sinks, so must poetry, too, be 
ultimately dragged down into the general gulf of feeble¬ 
ness and inanition. 

It was a saying of John Foster that “eloquence resides 
in the thought, and no words, therefore, can make that 
eloquent which will not be so in the plainest that could 
possibly express the same.” Nothing, therefore, can be 
more absurd than the notion that the sounding brass and 
tinkling cymbal of pompous and sonorous language are 
necessary to the expression of the sublime and powerful 
in eloquence and poetry. So far is this from being true, 
that the finest, noblest, and most spirit-stirring sentiments 
ever uttered, have been couched, not in sounding poly- 


GRAND WORDS. 


123 


syllables from the Greek or Latin, but in the simplest 
Saxon,— in the language we hear hourly in the streets 
and by our firesides. Dr. Johnson once said that “big 
thinkers require big words.” He did not think so at the 
time of the great Methodist movement in the last century, 
when “ the ice period ” of the establishment was breaking 
up. He attributed the Wesleys’ success to their plain, 
familiar way of preaching, “ which,” he says, “ clergymen 
of genius and learning ought to do from a principle of 
duty.” Arthur Helps tells a story of an illiterate soldier 
at the chapel of Lord Morpeth’s castle in Ireland. When¬ 
ever Archbishop Whately came to preach, it was observed 
that this rough private was always in his place, mouth 
open, as if in sympathy with his ears. Some of the gen¬ 
tlemen playfully took him to task for it, supposing it was 
due to the usual vulgar admiration of a celebrated man. 
But the man had a better reason, and was able to give 
it. He said, “That isn’t it at all. The Archbishop is easy 
to understand. There are no fine words in him. A fellow 
like me, now, can follow along and take every bit of it in.” 
“ Whately’s simplicity,” observes a writer to whom we are 
indebted for this illustration, “ meant no lack of pith or 
power. The whole momentum of his large and healthy 
brain went into those homely sentences, rousing and feed¬ 
ing the rude and the cultured hearer’s hunger alike, as 
sweet bread and juicy meat satisfy a natural appetite.” 

Emerson observes that as any orator at the bar or the 
senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language; 
that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of 
passion, he comes down to a level with the ear of all 
his audience. “It is the oratory of John Brown and of 
Abraham Lincoln, the one at Charleston, the other at 


124 


words; their use ao abuse. 


Gettysburg, in the two best specimens of oratory we have 
had in this country.” Daniel Webster, in his youth, was 
a little bombastic in his speeches; but he very soon dis¬ 
covered that the force of a sentence depends chiefly on 
its meaning, and that great writing is that in which 
much is said in few wrnrds, and those the simplest that 
will answer the purpose. Having made this discovery, 
he became “a great eraseT of adjectives”; and whether 
convincing juries, or thundering in the senate,—whether 
demolishing Hayne, or measuring swords with Calhoun,— 
on all occasions used the plainest words. “You will find,” 
said he to a friend, “in my speeches to juries, no hard 
words, no Latin phrases, no fieri facias ; and that is the 
secret of my style, if I have any.” 

Chaucer says, in praise of his Virginia, that 

“No contrefited termes had she 
To semen wise;” 

and if any one would write or speak well, his English 
should be genuine, not counterfeit. The simplest words 
that will convey one’s ideas are always best. What can 
be simpler and yet more sublime than the “ Let there be 
light, and there was light!” of Moses, which Longinus so 
admired? Would it be an improvement to say, “Let 
there be light, and there was a solar illumination”? “I 
am like a child picking up pebbles on the seashore,” said 
Newton. Had he said he was like an awe-struck votary, 
lying prostrate before the stupendous majesty of the cos- 
mical universe, and the mighty and incomprehensible 
Ourgos which had created all things, we might think it 
very fine, but should not carry in our memories such a 
luggage of words. The fiery eloquence of the field and 
the forum springs upon the vulgar idiom as a soldier 


grand words. 


125 


leaps upon his horse. “ Trust in the Lord, and keep your 
powder dry,” said Cromwell to his soldiers on the eve of 
a battle. “ Silence, you thirty voices! ” roars Mirabeau to 
a knot of opposers around the tribune. “I’d sell the shirt 
off my back to support the war!” cries Lord Chatham; 
and again, “Conquer the Americans! I might as well think 
of driving them before- me with this crutch.” “ I know,” 
says Kossuth, speaking of the march of intelligence, “that 
the light has spread, and that even the bayonets think.” 
“You may shake me, if you please,” said a little Yankee 
constable to a stout, burly culprit whom he had come to 
arrest, and who threatened violence, “but recollect, if 
you do it, you don’t shake a chap of five-feet-six; you’ve 
got to shake the whole State of Massachusetts /” When a 
Hoosier was asked by a Yankee how much he weighed,— 
“Well,” said he, “commonly I weigh about one hundred 
and eighty; but when I'm mad I weigh a ton!” “Were 
I to die at this moment,” wrote Nelson after the battle 
of the Nile, more frigates' would be found written on 
my heart.” The “Don’t give up the ship!” of our mem¬ 
orable sea-captain stirs the heart like the sound of a 
trumpet. Had he exhorted the men to fight to the last 
gasp in defence of their imperilled liberties, their altars, 
and the glory of America, the words might have been 
historic, but they would not have been quoted vernacu¬ 
larly, as they have been, for over threescore years and 
ten. 

There is another phase of the popular leaning to the 
grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that 
which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign 
words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and 
the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in 


126 words; their use and abuse. 

our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, 
like Ann ado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great 
feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. Many persons 
scarcely deign to call anything by its proper English name, 
but, as if they believed with Butler, that 

“He that’s but able to express 
No sense at all in several languages, 

Will pass for learneder than he that’s known 
To speak strongest reason in his own,”— 

they apply to it some German, French, or Italian word. 
In their dialect people are biases, and passes, or have un air 
distingue; in petto, dolce far niente, are among their pet 
phrases; and not infrequently they betray their ignorance 
by some ludicrous blunder, as when they use boquet for 
bouquet, soubriquet for sobriquet, and talk of a sous, 
instead of a sou, a mistake as laughable as the French¬ 
man’s “ un pence.” Some of the modern fashionable nov¬ 
elists and writers of books of travel have even shown so 
bad a taste as to state in German, French, or Italian, 
whatever is supposed to have been said by Germans, 
Frenchmen, or Italians. In Currer Bell’s “ Villette ” a 
large proportion of the dialogue, even in pages contain¬ 
ing the very marrow of the plot, is thus written in French, 
making the book, though an English book, unintelligible 
to an Englishman, however familiar with his native 
tongue, unless he has mastered a foreign one also, and 
that not in its purity, but “ after the scole of Stratford- 
atte-Bowe.” In striking contrast to this taste for exotics 
is the rooted dislike which the French have to foreign 
words and idioms. It is only in cases of the direst neces¬ 
sity that they consent to borrow from their neighbors, 
whether in perfide Angleterre or elsewhere. Even when 


GRAND WORDS. 


127 


they deign to adopt a new word, they so disguise it that 
the parent language would not know it again. They strip 
it gradually of its foreign dress, and make it assume the 
costume of the country. “Beefsteak” is turned into bif- 
teck; “ plum-pudding” is metamorphosed into pouding de 
plomb ; “partner” becomes partenaire; “riding-coat” be¬ 
comes redingote ; and now fashionable English tailors adver¬ 
tise these “ redingotes,” never for a moment dreaming 
that they are borrowing an expression which the French 
stole from the English. It was their contempt for the 
practice of borrowing foreign words that enabled the 
Greeks to preserve their native tongue so long in its 
purity; while on the contrary, by an affectation in the 
Romans of Greek words and idioms, the Latin language 
was not only corrupted, but lost in a few centuries much 
of the beauty and majesty it had in the Augustan age. 

It is said that the Spaniards, in all ages, have been 
distinguished for their love of long and high-flown names, 
— the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of appellative 
glory and honor. In looking at the long string of titles 
fastened like the tail of a kite to the name of some Don 
or other grandee, one is puzzled to tell whether it is the 
man that belongs to the name, or the name to the man. 
There is nothing odd, therefore, in the conduct of that 
Spaniard, who, whenever his name was mentioned, always 
took off his hat in token of respect to himself,— that is, as 
the possessor of so many appellations. A person of high 
diplomatic talent, with the unpretending and rather ple¬ 
beian name of “ Bubb,” was once nominated to represent 
Great Britain at Madrid. Lord Chesterfield was then a 
minister of state, and on seeing the newly appointed min¬ 
ister remarked,—“ My dear fellow, your name will damn 


128 


words; their use and abuse. 


you with the Spaniards; a one-syllable patronymic will 
infallibly disgust the grandees of that hyperbolic nation.” 
“What shall I do?” said Bubb. “Oh, that is easily man¬ 
aged,” rejoined the peer; “get yourself dubbed, before 
you start on your mission, as Don Yaco y Hijo Hermoso 
y Toro y Sill y Bubb, and on your arrival you will have 
all the Spanish Court at your feet.” 

The effort of the Spaniards to support their dignity by 
long and sounding titles is repeated daily, in a slightly 
different form, by many democratic Americans. Writers 
and speakers are constantly striving to compensate for 
poverty of thought by a multitude of words. Magnilo¬ 
quent terms, sounding sentences, unexpected and startling 
phrases, are dropped from pen and tongue, as gaudy and 
high-colored goods are displayed in shop windows, to at¬ 
tract attention. “ Buskin,” says an intelligent writer, 
“ long ago cried out against the stuccoed lies which rear 
their unblushing fronts on so many street corners, sham¬ 
ing our civilization, and exerting their whole influence to 
make us false and pretentious. Mrs. Stowe and others 
have warned us against the silken lies that, frizzled, 
flounced, padded, compressed, lily-whitened and rouged, 
flit about our drawing rooms by gaslight, making us 
familiar with sham and shoddy, and luring us away from 
real and modest worth. Let there be added to these com¬ 
plaints the strongest denunciation of the kindred literary 
lies which hum about our ears and glitter before our eyes, 
which corrupt the language, and wrong every man and 
woman who speaks it by robbing it of some portion of 
its beauty and power.” 

When shall we learn that the secret of beauty and of 
force, in speaking and in writing, is not to say simple 


GRAND WORDS. 


129 


things finely, but to say fine things as simply as possible? 
“ To clothe,” says Fuller, “ low creeping matter with high- 
flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It 
rather loads than raises a wren to fasten the feathers of 
an ostrich to her wings.” It is a significant fact that the 
books over which generation after generation of readers 
has hung with the deepest delight,— which have retained 
their hold, amid all the fluctuations of taste, upon all 
classes,— have been written in the simplest and most 
idiomatic English, that English for which the “fine school” 
of writers would substitute a verbose and affected phrase¬ 
ology. Such books are “ Robinson Crusoe,” “ Gulliver’s 
Travels,” and “ Pilgrim’s Progress,” which Macaulay has 
justly characterized as treasures of pure English. Fitz- 
Greene Halleck tells us that some years ago a letter fell 
into his hands which a Scotch servant girl had written to 
her lover. The style charmed him, and his literary friends 
agreed that it was fairly inimitable. Anxious to clear up 
the mystery of its beauty, and even elegance, he searched 
for its author, who thus solved the enigma: “Sir, I came 
to this country four years ago. Then I did not know how 
to read or write. Since then I have learned to read and 
write, but I have not yet learned how to spell; so always 
when I sit down to write a letter, I choose those words 
which are so short and simple that I am sure to know 
how to spell them.” This was the whole secret. The 
simple-minded Scotch girl knew more of rhetoric than 
Blair or Campbell. As Halleck forcibly says: “Simplicity 
is beauty. Simplicity is power.” 

It is through the arts and sciences, whose progress is 
so rapid, that many words of “ learned length and thun¬ 
dering sound” force their way in these days into the 


130 


words; their use and abuse. 


language. The vocabulary of science is so repugnant to 
the ear and so hard to the tongue, that it is a long while 
before its terms become popularized. We may be sure that 
many years will elapse before “ aristolochioid,” “ megalo- 
saurus,” “acanthopterygian,” “nothoclsena-trichomanoides,” 
“ monopleurobranchian,” “ anonaceo - liydrocharideo - nym- 
phseoid,” and other such “ huge verbal blocks, masses of 
syllabic aggregations, which both the tongue and the taste 
find it difficult to surmount,” will establish themselves in 
the language of literature and common life. Still, while 
the lover of Anglo-Saxon simplicity is rarely shocked by 
such terms, there are hundreds of others,. less stupen¬ 
dous, such as “phenomenon,” “demonstrative,” “inverse 
proportion,” “transcendental,” “category,” “predicament,” 
“ exorbitant,” which, once heard only in scientific lecture 
rooms or in schools, are now the common currency of the 
educated; and it is said that in one of our Eastern col¬ 
leges, the learned mathematical professor, on whom the 
duty devolved one morning of making the chapel prayer, 
startled his hearers by asking Divine Goodness to enable 
them to know its length, its breadth, and its superficial 
contents. Should popular enlightenment go on for some 
ages with the prodigious strides it has lately made, a 
future generation may hear lovers addressing their mis¬ 
tresses in the terms predicted by Punch: 

“I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me. 

Our mutual flame is like the affinity 
That doth exist between two simple bodies. 

I am Potassium to thine Oxygen. 

. . . Sweet, thy name is Briggs, 

And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we 
Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs? 

We will. The day, the happy day is nigh, 

When Johnson shall with beauteous Briggs combine.” 


GRAND WORDS. 


131 


It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology 
of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many 
things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be 
productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as 
this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often 
needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the 
language of common life were equally invariable and 
unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius 
crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of 
the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers 
in our treatises on botany, when compared with such 
popular names as “ Stag-beetle,” “ Rosemary,” and “ For¬ 
get-me-not!” To express the results of science without 
the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, 
unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can com¬ 
municate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a 
law case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Al¬ 
most invariably the learned witness finds a wound “ in the 
parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; 
or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar 
region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years 
ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a wit¬ 
ness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you 
not, sir?” — at the same time translating his scientific 
barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “ I do, 
my Lord.” “Then why can’t you say so?” He had said 
so, but in a foreign tongue. 

To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ 
grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, 
we would say, as Falstaif said to Pistol: “If thou hast 
any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like 
a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college 


132 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given 
by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a school¬ 
master. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it 
seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work 
near his house. “ No, sir,” was the reply, “ I am only 
digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered 
by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady 
who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a polit¬ 
ical tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas 
Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politi¬ 
cian, but found no one at home but his niece, who pre¬ 
sided at the tea-table. Having never conversed with 
“great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them 
in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take 
condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. 
“ Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s 
eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be 
resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial 
in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady 
addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,—“ Will you 
take condiments in your tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt, 
but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, 
it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was 
“ horridly vulgar.” 

The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue 
would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of 
resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need 
find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the 
language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Words¬ 
worth, and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon, 
Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which 
Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in 


GRAND WORDS. 


133 


which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have 
spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only 
these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it 
is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind; 
that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet, 
portray the deepest emotions of the human heart ; that 
it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly 
courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profound- 
est researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore, 
because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many 
writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real 
cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious 
musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a 
defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The 
fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous 
of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed; 
“ the fact is, you have no music in your soul .” 

We are aware that the English tongue,— our own 
cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,— 
has been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse 
the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and 
for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute. 
It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles 
V, three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of 
birds; and others since, from the predominance of the s, 
to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water. Madame 
de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge 
breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,— whose 
own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody 
than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed 
the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,— 


134 


words; their use and abuse. 


turns traitor to his native language, and in a moment of 
caprice denounces it for its harshness: 

“I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, 

Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, 

And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, 

With syllables that breathe of the sweet South, 

And gentle liquids, gliding all so pat in, 

That not a single accent seems uncouth, 

Like our harsh, Northern, whistling, grunting guttural, 

Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.” 

It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very 
selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown 
the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures. 
What can be softer, more musical, or more beautifully 
descriptive, than the “gentle liquids gliding,” and the 
words “breathe of the sweet South”; and where among 
all the languages of the “ sweet South ” would he have 
found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm, so satur¬ 
ated with harshness, as the terms “ harsh,” “ uncouth,” 
“northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,” 
“spit,” and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the 
hand that possesses strength and power may have as delicate 
a touch, when needed, as the hand of nervous debility. 
The English language can drop the honeyed words of peace 
and gentleness, and it can visit with its withering, scathing, 
burning, blasting curse .' 1 ' 1 Again, even Addison, who wrote 
so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the 
vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter 
is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its 
sensuous merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, 
too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his 
name, declares that 

“Poets that lasting marble seek, 

Must carve in Latin or in Greek.” 


GRAIN'D WORDS. 


135 


Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has 
been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and 
liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and 
that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. 
But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor 
has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations 
of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression 
to the harsher passions, and in imparting keenness and 
significancy to the language of discrimination, and espe¬ 
cially to that of scorn. 

The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, 
or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and 
most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas 
More long ago declared: “It is plenteous enough to ex- 
presse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath 
used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite 
character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every 
shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the 
vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. 
But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might 
well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the 
tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has 
made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the 
mingling of divers tongues given them a language which 
is one of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed 
to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language 
has been made the ground of an accusation against it; 
and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that 
he “ has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the 
scraps ”; that his dialect is “ the alms-basket of wit,” made 
up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in 
originality. 


136 


words; their use and abuse. 


It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely 
from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving 
desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole 
empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their lan¬ 
guages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which 
his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to 
enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip 
him of his borrowings,— or “annexations,” if you will,— 
and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, 
nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering 
ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin, and French, 
which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are 
indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Ara¬ 
bic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian 
dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. 
The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in 
size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four 
thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the 
Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus bor¬ 
rowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious 
etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies 
are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, 
one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and 
power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abun¬ 
dance far more than it loses in apparent originality. 
Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is 
yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual 
as the French or the German. Though the rough mate¬ 
rials are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its 
digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant 
aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are 
as speedily identified with its own independent existence 


GRAND WORDS. 


137 


as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the 
hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part 
and parcel of the proper substance,— the breast, leg, or 
arm,— of an Illinois farmer^ 

In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our 
idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make for¬ 
eigners “ stare and gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own 
philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the noble¬ 
ness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent 
to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions 
prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its 
worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous 
in Greek than in Latin,— in French or Italian than in 
Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, 
gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, 
which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in 
the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the 
former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle 
ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces 
in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained 
him who soared “ above all Greek, above all Roman fame”; 
and the same “ well of English undefiled ” did not fail the 
myriad-minded dramatist, when 

“Each scene of many colored life he drew, 

Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.” 

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied 
as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language 
for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the 
full. It has “ combinations of sound grander than ever 
rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the 
mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; 
more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the 


138 


WOliDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.” 
To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harsh¬ 
ness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George 
Herbert: 

“ Let foreign nations of their language boast, 

What fine variety each tongue affords; 

I like our language, as our men and coast:— 

Who cannot dress it well , want wit, not words.” 


CHAPTER IV. 


SMALL WORDS. 


It is with words as with sunbeams, — the more they are condensed, the 
deeper they burn.—S outhey. 

Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps 
splitting itself into halves.— Coleridge. 



MONG the various forms of ingratitude, one of the 


- 1 commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by 
which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good 
illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the 
following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree 
for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music 
of our tongue, sneers at them as low: 


“While feeble expletives their aid do join, 

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.” 


“ How ingenious! how felicitous!” the reader exclaims; and, 
truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridi¬ 
culing the Saxon part of the language with words bor¬ 
rowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise 
little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twick¬ 
enham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English 
literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having 
the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of 
passages in his works, in which the small words form not 
only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in 
the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough 
their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of 
such a line as that quoted. “ Small words,” he elsewhere 


139 


140 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


says, “ are generally stiff and languishing, but they may 
be beautiful to express melancholy.” It is the old story of 

“-the ladder 

Whereto the climber upward turns his face, 

But when he once attains the utmost round, 

He then unto the ladder turns his back, 

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
By which he did ascend.” 

The truth is, the words most potent in life and liter¬ 
ature,— in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at 
the fireside,— are small words, the monosyllables which 
the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All pas¬ 
sionate expression,— the outpouring of the soul when 
moved to its depths,— is, for the most part, in monosyl¬ 
lables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the 
brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its 
giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for 
the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce 
temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all 
the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little 
monosyllables, “Yes” and “No”! “‘Yes’ is the Olympian 
nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and 
light; ‘no’ is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven 
and darkens the faces of the gods. ‘ Yes : 1 how it trembles 
from the maiden’s lips, the broken utterance, the key- 
syllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how 
it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and 
makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the 
triumphing conqueror, Love. ‘No, 1 —well might Miles 
Standish say that he could not stand fire if ‘No 1 should 
come ‘point-blank from the mouth of a woman 1 ; what 
‘captain, colonel or knight-at-arms 1 could? ‘No 1 : ’tis the 
impregnable fortress,— the very Malakoff of the will; it 


SMALL WORDS. 


141 


is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the 
charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. 
It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it 
is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that 
dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and 
faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start 
from the disguise of a beggar.” 

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those 
among the most expressive in the language, of which the 
great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the inter¬ 
jections. We are aware that some philologists deny that 
interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this 
whole class of words as “brutish and inarticulate,” as 
“ the miserable refuge of the speechless,” and complains 
that, “ because beautiful and gaudy,” they have been 
suffered to usurp a place among words. “ Where will 
you look for it” (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; 
“ will you find it among laws, or in books of civil insti¬ 
tutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or 
sciences ? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and 
poetry, in novels, plays and romances.” This acute writer 
has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, 
and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest gran¬ 
deur and pathos,— namely, the Bible. But the use of this 
part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard 
wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether 
on the gravest or the most trivial themes; in tones of 
the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of 
joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of 
deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the out¬ 
burst of every human feeling. More than this, not only 
is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest 


142 words; their use and abuse 

authority that it is heard in the hallelujahs of angels, 
and in the continual “Holy! Holy! Holy!” of the cher¬ 
ubim. 

What word in the English language is fuller of sig¬ 
nificance, has a greater variety of meanings, than the 
diminutive “Oh”? Uttered by the infant to express surprise 
or delight, it is used, by the man to indicate fear, aspira¬ 
tion or appeal, and, indeed, according to the tone in which 
it is uttered, may voice almost any one of the emotions 
of wdiich he is capable. What a volume of meaning is 
condensed in the derisive “ Oh! oh! ” which greets a silly 
utterance in the House of Commons! In no other assem¬ 
bly, perhaps, are the powers of human speech more fully 
exhibited; yet it was in that body that one of the most 
famous of interjections originated,— we mean the cry of 
“Hear! hear!” which, though at first an imperative verb, 
is now “ nothing more or less than a great historical 
interjection,” indicating, according to the tone in which 
it is uttered, admiration, acquiescence, indignation or 
derision. It has been truly said that when a large assem¬ 
bly is animated by a common sentiment which demands 
instantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only 
through interjections. 

Again, how many exquisite passages in poetry owe to 
the interjection their beauty, their pathos, or their power! 
“The first sincere hymn,” says M. Taine, “is the one word 
4 0.’ ” This “ 0,” the sign of the vocative, must not be 
confounded with “Oh!” the emotional interjection, which 
expresses a sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, 
etc. What depth of meaning is contained in that little 
word, as an expression of grief, in the following lines by 
W ordsworth: 


SMALL WORDS. 


143 


“She lived unknown, and few could know 
When Lucy ceased to be! 

Now she is in her grave,—and oh! 

The difference to me.” 

What possible combination of words could be more 
significant than the reply “Pooh! pooh!” to a contro¬ 
versialist’s theory, or the contemptuous “ Fudge! ” with 
which Mr. Churchill, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” sums 
up the pretensions of the languishing Miss Carolina 
Wilhelmina Amelia Skegcrs: 

o o 

“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is 
that to be found?” 

“ Fudge!” 

How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans 
at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how 
forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at 
the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What vol¬ 
umes of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little 
word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying 
‘ psha,' and sneering.” How expressive are those almost 
infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of hu¬ 
man life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: 
“‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjec¬ 
tion of sorrow. The difference between them is very small^ 
as consisting only in the transposition of what is no sub¬ 
stantial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in 
the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath, 
is our mirth changed to mourning!” 

“Nature in many tones complains, 

Has many sounds to tell her pains; 

But for her joys has only three. 

And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he! ” 

The truth is that, so far is this class of words from 
being, as Max Muller contends, the mere outskirts of lan¬ 
guage, they are more truly words than any others. These 


144 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, 
which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic 
isles,— these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, 
which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to 
all lips, and are understood by all men,— these “silver 
fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of 
Tennyson’s, “ the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the 
dictionaries of all races,”— 

“The only words 

Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”— 

are emphatically and preeminently language. It is doubt¬ 
less true that civilization, with its freezing formalities, 
tends to diminish the use of interjections, as well as their 
natural accompaniments, gesture and gesticulation; but on 
the other hand, it should be noted, that there are certain 
interjections which are the fruits of the highest and most 
mature forms of human culture. Interjections, in truth, 
are not so much “parts of speech” as entire expressions 
of feeling or thought. They are preeminently pictorial. If 
I pronounce the words “house,” “strike,” “black,” “beauti¬ 
fully,” without other words or explanatory gestures, I say 
nothing distinctly; I may mean any one of a hundred things; 
but if I utter an interjectional exclamation, denoting joy or 
sorrow, surprise or fear, every person who hears me knows 
at once by what affection I am moved. I communicate 
a fact by a single syllable. Instead of ranking below 
other words, the interjection stands on a higher plane, 
because its significance is more absolute and immediate. 
Moreover, from these despised parts of speech has been 
derived a whole class of words; as, for example, in the 
natural interjection “ah”! ach! we have the root of a 
large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as a/o?, 


SMALL WORDS. 


145 


achen! “ache,” “anguish,” “anxious,” angustus , and the 
word “agony” itself. Many words are used interjection- 
ally which are not interjections, such as “Farewell!” 
“Adieu!” “Welcome!” which are to be looked upon as 
elliptical forms of expression. They are, in fact, abbre¬ 
viated sentences, resembling the 0 for oo, “not,” with 
which the poet Philoxenus is said to have replied in 
writing to the tyrant Dionysius who had invited him to 
the court of Syracuse. The true interjection is an apos¬ 
trophe, condensed into a syllable. It is the effort of Nature 
to unburden herself of some intense, pressing emotion. 
It is the sigh of humanity for what it cannot have or 
hope for; for what it has lost; for what it did not value 
till it lost it. George Eliot thus defines it when she speaks 
of certain deeds as “little more than interjections, which 
give vent to the long passion of a life.” In oratory, poetry, 
and the drama, the interjection plays an important part. 
Public speakers, especially, find it indispensable to their 
success. “As the most eloquent men are apt to find their 
language inadequate to their needs,— as still, after they 
have exhausted their vocabulary of other words, 

‘There hover in these restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best, 

Which into words no virtue can digest,’ 

they find great need of the interjection. In their hands 
it deepens all assertions, gives utterance to intense long¬ 
ings, carries the hearer away into ultimate possibilities, 
and expresses the most passionate emotions in the instant 
of their most overwhelming power.” Who that is familiar 
with the history of oratory, does not remember instances 
when these little words, so despised by grammarians, have 
been more impressive, more to the point, more eloquent 
than a long speech? The interjections of Whitefield,— his 


146 


words; their use and abuse. 


“Ah!” of pity for the unrepentant sinner, and his “Oh!” of 
encouragement and persuasion for the almost converted 
listener,— were words of tremendous power, and formed 
a most potent engine in his pulpit artillery.* Garrick 
used to say that he would give a hundred guineas if he 
could say “ Oh! ” as Whitefield did. The condensed force 
of interjections,— their inherent expressiveness,— entitles 
them, therefore, to be regarded as the appropriate lan¬ 
guage, the mother-tongue of passion; and hence the 
effect of good acting depends largely on the proper intro¬ 
duction and just articulation of this class of words. 

Shakespeare’s interjections exact a rare command of 
modulation, and cannot be rendered with any truth except 
by one who has mastered the whole play. What a pro¬ 
found insight of the masterpiece of the poet is required of 
him who would adequately utter the word “ indeed ” in the 
following passage of Othello! “It contains in it,” says an 
English writer, “ the gist of the chief action of the play, 
and it implies all that the plot develops. It ought to be 
spoken with such an intonation as to suggest the diabolic 
scheme of Iago’s conduct. There is no thought of the 
grammatical structure of the compound, consisting of the 
preposition ‘in’ and the substantive ‘deed,’ which is equi¬ 
valent to ‘ act,’ ‘ fact,’ or ‘ reality.’ All this vanishes and 
is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed 
as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise.” 

“ Iago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. 

Oth. O, yes, and went between us very oft. 

Iago. Indeed ! 

Oth. Indeed? ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? 

Iago. Honest, my lord? 

Oth. Honest? ay, honest!” 

♦“Lectures on the English Language,” by G. P. Marsh. 


SMALL WORDS. 


147 


The Greek and Latin languages abound with interjec¬ 
tions, which are used by the orators and poets with great 
effect. To gratify the Athenians, as they behold their 
once proud enemy humbled to the dust, and draining the 
cup of affliction to the very last dregs, iEschylus, in his 
“ Persai,” employs almost every form of ejaculation in 
which abject misery can be expressed. 

The English language is preeminently a language of 
small words. It has more monosyllables than any other 
modern tongue, a peculiarity which gives it a strikingly 
direct and straightforward character, equally removed 
from the indirect French and the intricate, lumbering Ger¬ 
man. Its fondness for this class of words is even greater 
than that of the Anglo-Saxon. Not a few of our present 
monosyllables, such as the verbs “ to love,” “ bake,” 
“ beat,” “ slide,” “ swim,” “ bind,” “ blow,” “ brew,” were, 
in the Anglo-Saxon, dissyllables. The English language, 
impatient of all superfluities, cuts down its words to the 
narrowest possible limits,— lopping and condensing, never 
expanding. Sometimes it cuts off an initial syllable, as in 
“ gin ” for “ engine,” “ van ” for “ caravan,” “ prentice ” 
for “ apprentice,” “ ’bus ” for “ omnibus,” “ wig ” for “ per¬ 
iwig ”; sometimes it cuts off a final syllable or syllables, as 
in “aid” for “aidedecamp,” “prim” for “primitive,” “cit” 
for “citizen,” “grog” for “grogram,” “pants” for “pan¬ 
taloons,” “tick” for (pawnbroker’s) “ticket”; sometimes 
it strikes out a letter, or letters, from the middle of a 
word, or otherwise contracts it, as in “ last ” for “ latest,” 
“ lark ” for “ laverock,” “ since ” for “ sithence,” “ fort¬ 
night” for “ fourteen nights,” “ lord ” for “ hlaford,” 
“ morning ” for “ morrowning,” “ sent ” for “ sended,” 
“ chirp ” for “ chirrup ” or “ cheer up,” “ fag ” for “ fa- 


148 


words; their use and abuse. 


tigue,” “ consols ” for “ consolidated annuities.” The 
same abbreviating processes are followed, when English 
words are borrowed from the Latin. Thus we have the 
monosyllable “ strange ” from the trisyllable extraneus; 
“ spend ” from expendo ; “ scour ” from exscorio; “ stop ” 
from obstipo ; “ funnel ” from infundibulum; “ ply ” from 
plico ; “jetty” from ' projectum; “dean” from decanus ; 
“count” from cornputo; “stray” from extravagus ; 
“ proxy ” from procurator ; “ spell ” from syllabare , etc. 
Not only are single Latin words thus maimed when 
converted into English, and their letters changed, trans¬ 
posed, or omitted, but often two English words are clip¬ 
ped and squeezed into one word. Thus from “ proud ” 

and “dance” we have “prance”; from “grave” and 
“rough” we have “gruff”; from “scrip” and “roll” 
comes “scroll”; from “tread,” or “trot,” and “drudge,” 
we have “ trudge.” Even in the construction of its primi¬ 
tive monosyllables the English language manifests the 
same economy, and forms words of a totally different 
meaning by the simple change of a vowel; as, bag, beg, 

big, bog, bug; bat, bet, bit, bot, but; ball, bell, bill, boll, 

bull; or, again, by the change of the first letter; as, fight, 
light, might, night, right, tight,— dash, hash, lash, gash, 
rash, sash, wash. The final “ ed ” of our participles is 
rapidly disappearing, as a distinct syllable. Not con¬ 
tent with suppressing half the letters of our syllables, 
and half the syllables of our words, we clip our vowels, 
in speaking, shorter than any other people, so that our 
language threatens to become a kind of stenology, or 
algebraic condensation of thought,— a pemmican of ideas. 
Voltaire said that the English gained two hours a day by 
clipping their words. The same love of brevity has shown 


SMALL WORDS. 


149 


itself in rendering the final e in English always mute. In 
Chaucer the final e must often be sounded as a separate 
syllable, or the verse will limp. To the same cause we 
owe such expressions as “ten o’clock,” instead of “ 0 / the 
clock,” or “ on the clock,” and the hissing s, so offensive to 
foreign ears. The old termination of the verb, th, has given 
way to s in the third person singular, and en to a single 
letter in the third person plural. 

The Anglo-Saxon, the substratum of our modern Eng¬ 
lish, is emphatically monosyllabic; yet many of the 
grandest passages in our literature are made up almost 
exclusively of Saxon words. The English Bible abounds 
in grand, sublime, and tender passages, couched almost 
entirely in words of one syllable. The passage in Ezekiel, 
which Coleridge is said to have considered the sublimest 
in the whole Bible: “And he said unto me, son of man, 
can these bones live? And I answered, 0 Lord God, thou 
knowest,”— contains seventeen monosyllables to three 
others. What passage in Holy Writ surpasses in ener¬ 
getic brevity that which describes the death of Sisera,— 
“At her feet he bowed, he fell; at her feet he bowed, he 
fell, he lay down; where he bowed, there he fell down 
dead”? Here are twenty-two monosyllables to one dis¬ 
syllable thrice repeated, and that a word which is usually 
pronounced as a monosyllable. The lament of David over 
Saul and Jonathan is not surpassed in pathos by any sim¬ 
ilar passage in the whole range of literature; yet a very 
large proportion of these touching words are of one or 
two syllables:—“The beauty of Israel is slain upon the 
high places; how are the mighty fallen! . . Ye mountains 
of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain 
upon you, nor fields of offerings. . . Saul and Jonathan 


150 


WOKDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death 
they were not divided. . . They were swifter than eagles, 
they were stronger than lions. . . How are the mighty 
fallen in the midst of the battle! 0 Jonathan, thou wast 
slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my 
brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: 
thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” 
Occasionally a long word is used in the current version, 
where a more vivid or picturesque short one might have 
been employed, as where our Saviour exclaims: “Oh, ye 
generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from 
the wrath to come?” In one of the older versions 
“brood” is used in place of “generation,” with far greater 
effect. 

The early writers, the “pure wells of English unde¬ 
filed,” abound in small words. Shakespeare employs them 
in his finest passages, especially when he would paint a 
scene with a few masterly touches. Hear Macbeth: 

“ Here lay Duncan, 

His silver skin laced with his golden blood; 

And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in Nature 
For ruin’s wasteful entrance. There the murderers, 

Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers 
Unmannerly breech’d with gore.” 


Are monosyllables passionless? Listen, again, to the 
“ Thane of Cawdor”: 


“That is a step 

On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap, 
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires, 
Let not light see my black and deep desires. 
The eye winks at the hand. Yet, let that be 
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.” 


Two dissyllables only among fifty-two words! 

Bishop Hall, in one of his most powerful satires, speak- 


SMALL WORDS. 


151 


ing of the vanity of “ adding house to house and field to 

field,” has these beautiful lines: 

“ Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store, 

And he that cares for most shall find no more.” 

“What harmonious monosyllables!” exclaims the critic, 
Gifford; yet they may be paralleled by others in the same 
writer, equally musical and equally expressive. 

Was Milton tame? He knew when to use polysylla¬ 
bles of “learned length and thundering sound”; but he 
knew also when to produce the grandest effects by the 
small words despised by inferior artists. Read his account 
of the journey of the fallen angels: 

“Through many a dark and dreary vale 
They passed, and many a region dolorous, 

O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, 

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,— 

A universe of death.” 

In what other language shall we find in the same 
number of words a more vivid picture of desolation than 
this? Hear, again, the lost archangel calling upon hell 
to receive its new possessor: 

“ One who brings 

A mind not to be changed by place or time. 

The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. 

What matter where, if I be still the same, 

And what I should be-all but less than He 
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here, at least, 

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built 
Here for His envy; will not drive us hence; 

Here we may reign secure, and, in my choice, 

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; 

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.” 

Did Collins lack lyric beauty, grace, or power? Read 
the following exquisite lines, in which the truth of the 
sentiment that “ poetry is the short-hand of thought ” 
is strikingly illustrated: 


152 


words; their use and abuse. 


“ How sleep the brave who sink to rest 
By all their country’s wishes blest! 
When Spring, with dew’y fingers cold, 
Returns to deck their hallow’d mould, 
She there shall dress a sweeter sod 
Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod. 

By fairy hands their knell is rung, 

By forms unseen their dirge is sung; 
There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, 

To bless the turf that wraps their clay; 
And Freedom shall a while repair, 

To dwell a weeping hermit there.” 


Where, in the whole range of English poetry, shall we 
find anything more perfect than these lines? What a 
quantity and variety of thought are here condensed into 
two verses, like a cluster of rock crystals, sparkling and 
distinct, yet receiving and reflecting lustre by the com¬ 
bination! Poetry and picture, pathos and fancy, grandeur 
and simplicity, are combined in verse, the melody of which 
has never been surpassed. Yet, out of the seventy-nine 
words in these lines, sixty-two are monsyllables. 

Did Byron lack force or fire? His skilful use of mono¬ 
syllables is often the very secret of his charm. It is true 
that he too frequently resorts to quaint, obsolete, and out¬ 
landish terms, thinking thereby to render his style more 
gorgeous or grand. But his chief strength lies in his 
despotic command over the simplest forms of speech. 
Listen to the words in which he describes the destruction 
of Sennacherib: 

“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, 

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; 

And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill, 

And their hearts beat but once, and forever lay still.” 


Here, out of forty-two words, all but four are mono¬ 
syllables; and yet how exquisitely are all these monosylla¬ 
bles linked into the majestic and animated movement of 


SMALL WORDS, 


153 


the anapestic measure! Again, what can be more musical 
and more melancholy than the opening verse of the lines 
in which the same poet bids adieu to his native land? 

“Adieu! adieu! my native shore 
Fades o’er the waters blue, 

The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar, 

And shrieks the wild sea-mew. 

Yon sun that sets upon the sea 
We follow in his flight; 

Farewell awhile to him and thee, 

My native land, good night! 

With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go 
Athwart the foaming brine; 

Nor care what land thou bear’st me to, 

So not again to mine. 

Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves 
And when you fail my sight, 

Welcome, ye deserts and ye caves! 

My native land, good night!” 

Two Latin words, “native” and “desert”; one French, 
“adieu”; the rest, English purely. The third and fourth 
lines paint the scene to the life; yet all the words but one 
are monosyllables. 

How graceful, tender, thoughtful, and melancholy, are 
the following lines by Moore, of which the monosyllabic 
music is one of the principal charms: 


“Those evening bells! those evening bells! 
How many a tale their music tells, 

Of youth and home, and that sweet time, 
When last I heard their soothing chime. 

Those joyous hours have passed away; 

And many a heart, that then was gay. 
Within the tomb now darkly dwells, 

And hears no more those evening bells. 

And so ’twill be when I am gone; 

That tuneful peal will still ring on, 

While other bards shall walk those dells. 
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!” 


154 


words; their use and abuse. 


The following brief passage from one of Landor’s poems 
strikingly illustrates the metrical effect of simple words of 
one syllable: 

“She was sent forth 

To bring that light which never wintry blast 
Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes — 

The light that shines from loving eyes upon 
Eyes that lbve back, till they can see no more.” 

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; 
nearly all the rest are monosyllables. 

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “ Philosophy 
of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of 
Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due 
largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a 
thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in 
fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion 
as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. 
If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his 
attention, and diminish the strength of the impression 
made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of 
entire w^ords or of parts of words. “ Formerly,” says an 
able writer, “ when armies engaged in battle, they were 
drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; 
but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several 
files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any 
troops he chose into action, and, even after the first on¬ 
slaught, change the whole order of the field; and though 
such a broken line might not have pleased an old sol¬ 
dier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it 
carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. 
There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of sup¬ 
pleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree 
kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all 


SMALL WORDS. 


155 


languages as they become more refined; and so far are 
monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, 
that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of 
Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North 
America) abound in huge unkempt words,—yardlongtailed, 
like fiends.” 

I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s 
fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the 
lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our 
own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, 
and never use one when they can find a pompous poly¬ 
syllable to take its place. It is evident from the passages 
I have cited, that these Liliputians,— these Tom Thumbs 
of the dictionary,— play as important a part in our liter¬ 
ature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. 
Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for 
high treason, he said that he was “ the miserable victim 
of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infuso¬ 
ria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known 
to have raised whole continents from the depths of the 
ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in 
importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an im¬ 
portant class in the great family of words. 

The class of small words which were once contempt¬ 
uously called “ particles,” are now acknowledged to be the 
very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. 
Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation 
thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An 
uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as 
a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and 
modify its ideas,— in short, to pursue metaphysical in¬ 
quiries, and to reason logically,— the microscopic parts of 


156 


words; their use and abuse. 


speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing 
the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary. 
What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal 
book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the 
ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, 
or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been 
like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It 
is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other 
cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his 
sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “ lies like an Egyptian 
king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.” 
When a man half understands the subject of which he 
speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, 
use words of “ learned length and thundering sound.” 
But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels 
deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can under¬ 
stand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike 
out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it 
sends its bullets straight to the point.* When, after wea¬ 
rily waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his 
indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, 
from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp, 
and stinging terms. 

In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon lan¬ 
guage, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; 
that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by 
the vowel a alone, more than five hundred ; by the vowel 
e, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel about four 
hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the 
vowel w, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit 
that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even 


* u The Use of Short Words,” by Hon. Horatio Seymour. 


SMALL WORDS. 


157 


the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated 
as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know 
when and how to use them is of no less moment to the 
speaker or writer than to know when to use the gran¬ 
diloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the 
language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has 
occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or 
pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,— 
themselves a happy example of the thing he commends: 

“Think not that strength lies in the big round word, 

Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak. 

To whom can this be true who once has heard 
The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak 
When want or woe or fear is in the throat, 

So that each word gasped out is like a shriek 
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange, wild note 
Sung by some fay or fiend? There is a strength 
Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine. 

Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length; 
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine, 

And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase, 

Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine,— 

Light, but no heat—a flash, but not a blaze! 

Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts; 

It serves of more than fight or storm to tell, 

The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts, 

The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell, 

The roar of guns, the groans of men that die 
On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well 
For them that far off on their sick beds lie; 

For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead; 

For them that laugh, and dance, and clap their hand; 

To joy’s quick step, as well as grief’s slow tread, 

The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time; 

And though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand, 

With each, with all, these may be made to chime. 

In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme.” 


CHAPTER V. 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 

Polonius. What do you read, my Lord? 

Hamlet. Words, words, words.— Shakespeare. 

Is not cant the materia prima of the Devil, from which all falsehoods, 
imbecilities, abominations, body themselves; from which no true thing can 
come? For cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie; the second power of 
a lie.— Carlyle. 

Mankind are fond of inventing certain solemn and sounding expressions 
which appear to convey much, and in reality mean little; words that are the 
proxies of absent thoughts, and, like other proxies, add nothing to argument, 
while they turn the scales of decision.— Shelley. 

S OME years ago the author of the “ Biographical His¬ 
tory of Philosophy,” in a criticism of a certain pub¬ 
lic lecturer in London, observed that one of his most 
marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. “ He 
accept# no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does 
not in his soul admire. He pretends to be nothing that 
he is not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how 
many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it? Oh, 
if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If 
men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas,— 
pretending to admire, pretending to believe, and all in 
sheer respectability!” 

Who does not admire the quality here commended, and 
yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an 
amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how 
few persons is the tongue an index to the heart! What 

a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of 

158 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


159 


social intercourse! Everybody knows that “How d’ye 
do?” and “Good morning!” are parroted in most cases 
without a thought of their meaning, or at least, without 
any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the 
person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we 
secretly detest with “ My dear sir,” and at the end sub¬ 
scribe ourselves his “ obedient servant,” though we should 
resent a single word from him which implied a belief in 
our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a com¬ 
mand. But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollow¬ 
ness of which may be excused on the ground that they 
sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest 
men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet 
startling to reflect how large a proportion of human 
speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words 
the meaning of which they have never weighed or dis¬ 
criminated, is bad enough; but that they should habitu¬ 
ally use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly 
worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in 
which man can be placed toward man, that does not call 
into play more or less of language without meaning. 
The “ damnable iteration ” of the lawyer in a declaration 
of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than 
is the asseveration of one petitioner that he “ will ever 
pray,” etc., and of another that he “ will be a thousand 
times obliged,” if you will grant his request. Who does 
not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling 
kindness done by one person to another often gives occa¬ 
sion on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for 
words and phrases in which to express his pretended grat¬ 
itude, while, in fact, he is only keenly humiliated by 
having to accept a favor, and the other as eloquently dis- 


160 


words; their use and abuse. 


claims any merit in the grant, which he really grudged, 
and will never think of without feeling that he made 
a great sacrifice. 

The secret feeling of many a “ public benefactor,” 
loudly praised by the newspapers, was finely let out by 
Lord Byron when he sent four thousand pounds to the 
Greeks, and privately informed a friend that he did not 
think he could well get off for less. How man} 7 wedding 
and other presents, and subscriptions to testimonials and 
to public enterprises, are made by those who secretly 
curse the occasion that exacts them! With the stereo¬ 
typed “thanks” and “grateful acknowledgments” of the 
shopkeeper all are familiar, as they are with “the last,” 
the “ positively the last,” and the “ most positively the 
very last” appearances of the dramatic stars that shine 
for five hundred or a thousand dollars a night. As 
nobody is deceived by these phrases, it seems hypercrit¬ 
ical to complain of them, and yet one can hardly help 
sympathizing with the country editor who scolds a cele¬ 
brated musician because he is now making farewell tours 
“ once a year,” whereas formerly he made them “ only 
once in five years.” Considering the sameness of shop¬ 
keepers’ acknowledgments, one cannot help admiring the 
daring originality of the Dutch commercial house of which 
the poet Moore tells, that concluded a letter thus: “Sugars 
are falling more and more every day; not so the respect 
and esteem with which we are your obedient servants.’’ 
The cant of public speakers is so familiar to the public 
that it is looked for as a matter of course. When a man 
is called on to address a public meeting, it is understood 
that the apology for his “ lack of preparation ” to meet 
the demand so “unexpectedly” made upon him, will 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


161 


preface the “impromptu” which he has spent weeks in 
elaborating, as surely as the inevitable “ This is so unex¬ 
pected” prefaces the reply of a maiden to the long- 
awaited proposal of marriage from her lover. 

Literary men are so wont to weigh their words that 
cant in them seems inexcusable; yet where shall we find 
more of it than in books, magazines, and newspapers? 
How many reasons are assigned by authors for inflicting 
their works on the public, other than the true one, 
namely, the pleasure of writing, the hope of a little 
distinction, or of a little money! How many writers pro¬ 
fess to welcome criticism, which they nevertheless ascribe 
to spite, envy, or jealousy, if it is unfavorable! What is 
intrinsically more deceptive than the multitudinous “we” 
in which every writer, great and small, hides his indi¬ 
viduality,— whether his object be, as Archdeacon Hare 
says, “ to pass himself off unnoticed, like the Irishman’s 
bad guinea in a handful of halfpence,” or to give to the 
opinions of a humble individual the weight and gravity 

of a council? “Who the - is ‘We’?” exclaimed the 

elder Kean on reading a scathing criticism upon his 
“Hamlet”; and the question might be pertinently asked 
of many other nominis umbrae who deliver their vaticina¬ 
tions and denunciations as oracularly as if they were lineal 
descendants of Minos or Rhadamanthus. Who can esti¬ 
mate the diminution of power and influence that would 
result should the ten thousand editors in the land, who 
now assume a mystic grandeur and speak with a voice 
of authority, as the organs of the public or a party, 
come down from their thrones, and exchange the regal 
“we” for the plebeian and egotistic “I”? “ Who is ‘I’?” 

the reader might exclaim, in tones even more contempt- 



162 


words; their use and abuse. 


uous than Kean’s. The truth is, “I” is a nobody. He 
represents only himself. He may be Smith or Jones,— 
the merest cipher. He may weigh but a hundred pounds, 
and still less morally and intellectually. He may be 
diminutive in stature, and in intellect a Tom Thumb. 
Who cares what such a pygmy thinks? But “we” repre¬ 
sents a multitude, an' imposing crowd, a mighty assembly, 
a congress, or a jury of sages; and we all quail before 
the opinions of the great “we.” As a writer has well 
said: “‘We have every reason to believe that beef will 
rise to starvation prices’ is a sentiment which, when 
read in a newspaper, will make the stoutest stomach 
tremble; but substitute an ‘I’ for the ‘we,’ and nobody 
cares a copper for the opinion. It has been well said 
that what terrified Belshazzar was the hand on the wall, 
because he couldn’t see to whom it belonged; and the 
same may be said of the editorial ‘ we.’ It is the mystery 
in which it is involved that invests it with potency.” 

The history of literature abounds with examples of 
words used almost without meaning by whole classes of 
writers. There is a time in the history of almost every 
literature when language apparently loses its vitality, 
and becomes dead, by being divorced from the living 
thought that created it. Many of the most effete and 
worn-out forms of expression, when first introduced, 
pleased by their novelty, and manifested originality in 
their inventors; but by dint of continual repetition, the 
delicate bloom has been rubbed off, and they have lost 
their power. A great deal of what is preserved in books, 
and is called fine writing, is made up of these lifeless 
parts of language, which are like the elements of a 
decayed and rotten tree, of which the organic form and 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


163 


structure are perfect, but the life of which has departed. 
It is the outward form of literature without the soul; an 
abundance of fine writing, but no ideas. It has been 
truly said that it is amazing to see how much of this 
dead material is accumulated at the present day; whole 
books filled to repletion with words without thoughts, 
standing like dead forests, upright indeed, and regular 
in form and structure, but presenting no fruit nor 
verdure, sheltering no life, monuments only of past 
vitality, and soon to crumble into oblivion. “Wander¬ 
ing through these catacombs of the mind, one meets every¬ 
where with the most admirable ‘ styles,’ which, doubtless, 
when first constructed, were the vehicles of as admirable 
thought, the fit language of great and stately minds, but 
which, transported from the past, and made to represent 
the little and despicable ‘notions’ of their plunderers, 
become a very mockery.” 

Who does not know how feeble and hollow British 
poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just before 
the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear in the 
costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; and 
dealing with the conventional manners and outside aspects 
of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the proper 
haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the 
vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated 
into a mere trick of art,— a hand-organ operation, in 
which one man could grind out tunes nearly as well as 
another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a perpetually 
recurring assortment of images, had become so much the 
traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set 
himself up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply 
himself with his stock in trade. The style that prevailed 


164 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell “ the Dick 
Swiveller style.” As Dick always called the wine “ rosy,” 
sleep “ balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen always em¬ 
ploy a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express the 
commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain, 
almanac name, but always “ Phoebus,” or “ the orb of day.” 
The moon w r as known only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the 
refulgent lamp of night.” Naiads were as plenty in every 
stream as trout or pickerel. If these poets wished to say 
tea, they would write 

“Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.” 

Coffee would be nothing less than 

“ The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray.” 

A boot would be raised to 

“The shining leather that the leg encased.” 

A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St. 
Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and 
a magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than 
“Minos” or “Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of 
a young man’s falling in love, he set himself to relate how 
Cupid laid himself in ambush in the lady’s eye, and from 
that fortress shot forth a dart at the breast of the unhappy 
youth, who straightway began to writhe under his wound, 
and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile upon 
him. All women in that golden age were “ nymphs ”; 
“dryads” were as common as birds; carriages were “har¬ 
nessed pomps”; houses, humble or stately “piles”; and 
not a wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or 
“ Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “ a gentle 
zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the 
well known lines: 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


165 


“While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, 

With sure returns of still expected rhymes, 

Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’ 

In the next line ‘it whispers through the trees’; 

If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’ 

The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with ‘sleep.’” 

Yet Pope himself was addicted to these circumlocutions 
and to threadbare mythological allusions, quite as much 
as the small wits whom he ridiculed. The manly genius 
of Cowper broke through these traditionary fetters, and 
relieved poetry from the spell in which Pope and his 
imitators had bound its phraseology and rhythm. Ex¬ 
pressing his contempt for the “creamy smoothness” of 
such verse, in which sentiment was so often 

“ Sacrificed to sound, 

And truth cut short to make a period round,” 

he cried: 

Give me the line that ploughs its stately course, 

Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force; 

That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart, 

Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.” 

The charm of Oowper’s letters, acknowledged by all 
competent judges to be the best in the English language, 
lies in the simplicity and naturalness,— the freedom from 
affectation,— by which they are uniformly characterized. 
Contrasting them with those of Wilberforce, Dr. Andrew 
Combe observes in a letter to a friend: “Cowper’s letters, 
to my mind, do far more to excit'e a deep sense of religion, 
than all the labored efforts of Wilberforce. The one gives 
expression simply and naturally to the thoughts and feel¬ 
ings which spring up spontaneously as he writes. The 
other forces in the one topic in all his letters, and lashes 
himself up to a due fervor of expression, whether the mind 
wills or not. On one occasion Wilberforce dispatched a 


166 


words; their use and abuse. 


very hurried letter on Saturday night, without any reli¬ 
gious expressions in it. In the night-time his conscience 
troubled him so much for the omission, that he could not 
rest till he sat down next morning and wrote a second with 
the piety, and apologizing for his involuntary departure 
from his rule! Only think what a perversion of a good 
principle this was!” 

It is in the conduct of political affairs that the class of 
words of which we have spoken are used most frequently. 
Sir Henry Wotton long since defined an ambassador as “a 
gentleman sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country.” 
In Europe, so indissolubly has diplomacy been associated 
with trickery, that it is said Talleyrand’s wonderful success 
with the representatives of foreign courts was owing largely 
to his frankness and fair dealing, nobody believing it pos¬ 
sible that he was striving for that for which he seemed to 
be striving. The plain, open, straightforward way in 
which he spoke of and dealt w r ith all public matters, com¬ 
pletely puzzled the vulgar minds, that could not dissociate 
from diplomacy the mysterious devices that distinguish the 
hack from the true diplomatist. In the titles and styles of 
address used by Kings and Emperors, we have examples of 
cant in its most meaningless forms. One sovereign is His 
Most Christian Majesty; another, Defender of the Faith, etc. 
A monarch, forced by public opinion to issue a commission 
of inquiry, addresses all the members of it as his “ well- 
beloved,” though in his heart he detests them. 

Everybody knows that George I of England obtained 
his crown, not by hereditary title, but by an Act of Parlia¬ 
ment; yet, in his very first speech to that body, he had the 
effrontery to speak of ascending the throne of his an¬ 
cestors. Well might Henry Luttrell exclaim: 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


167 


“O that in England there might he 
A duty on hypocrisy! 

A tax on humbug, an excise 
On solemn plausibilities, 

A stamp on everything that canted! 

No millions more, if these were granted, 

Henceforward would he raised or wanted.” 

So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “ wire¬ 
pulling,” and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected 
to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank 
his fellow-citizens for having sent him there “ by their 
voluntary, unbiased suffrages.” When the patriot, Patkul, 
was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII of Swe¬ 
den, the following sentence was read over to him: “It is 
hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our 
most merciful sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to 
his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc. 
“ What mercy! ” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with 
the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition 
was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to 
express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal 
welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the 
profession of extreme humility by men who are full of 
pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman 
Pontiffs styled himself “ the servant of the servants of 
God,” at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of 
Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his 
ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the 
Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or 
hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing 
the language of piety and benevolence, especially when 
about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the 
Fourteenth’s paroxysms of repentance and devotion were 
always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots; 


168 


words; their use and abuse. 


and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace, 
and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neigh¬ 
bors. While the French revolutionists were shouting 
“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed 
in Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by 
cartloads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite 
amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robes¬ 
pierre’s fellow-cutthroats, was the rearing of doves. The 
contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm 
of his existence, in consoling him for the wickedness of 
men. Even when he had reached the height of his “ bad 
preeminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National 
Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which 
he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody 
compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs 
as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded 
to him in vain for her husband’s life, in retiring from his 
presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel’s tail, he 
cried out, “ Good heavens, Madam! have you no humanity ?” 

“ My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “ clear your minds of 
cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice, 
many of them would be likely to find their occupation 
clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the 
sentiments and language of patriotism,— to pretend a zeal 
for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another 
thing, about which they are known to be comparatively in¬ 
different, as if any flummery might be crammed down the 
throats of the people,— that the voters, whom the old party 
hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their 
sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel 
O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had 
a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


169 


rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, 
and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with 
the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of 
halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch¬ 
words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his 
“head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know 
ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency. 

Offensive as are all these forms of speech without mean¬ 
ing, they are not more so than the hollow language of— 
strange to say,— some moral philosophers. Many persons 
have been so impressed by the ethical essays of Seneca, in 
which he sings the praises of poverty, and denounces in 
burning language the corruption of Rome and the ex¬ 
tortion in the provinces, that they could account for the 
excellence of these writings only on the theory of a Chris¬ 
tian influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman 
philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul. 
But what are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading 
them by the light of the author’s life and character, we 
find they are only words. A late German historian tells 
us that the same Seneca who could discourse so finely upon 
the abstemiousness and contentment of the philosopher, and 
who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt for earthly 
things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the four 
years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of 
three hundred millions of sesterces,— over fifteen millions 
of dollars. While writing his treatise on “ Poverty,” he 
had in his house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined 
wood brought from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost 
as much as twenty-five, and even seventy thousand dol¬ 
lars. The same Seneca, who denounced extortion with so 
virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens with the 


170 


words; their use and abuse. 


gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who 
preached so much about purity of morals, was openly 
accused of adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his 
pupil Nero into still more shameful practices. He wrote a 
work upon “ Clemency,” yet had, beyond question, a large 
part of Nero’s atrocities upon his conscience. It was he 
who composed the letter in which Nero justified before the 
Senate the murder of his own mother.* 

Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the 
stump and platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be 
feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, 
and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. 
It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all 
others the most awful and interesting, are too often con¬ 
sidered so true that they lose all the power of truth, and 
lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side 
with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual 
handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, 
and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can 
restore their full meaning. Gradually the terms most 
vital to belief cease to mean what they meant when first 
used; the electric life goes out of them; and, for all practi¬ 
cal purposes, they are dead. Hence it is that “ the tradi¬ 
tional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, 
have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because 
their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until 
personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, 
it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even 
politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, 
have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into life¬ 
less dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education 

*Ulhorn , s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94. 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


171 


expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning 
alive are barely found sufficient to counteract. ” * 

There can be little doubt that many a man whose life 
is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he 
is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety 
and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such 
pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this 
day apparently without a thought of their meaning? 
Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing 
“ the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “ little 
interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is 
not weary of the ding-dong of “ our Zion ” and the sole¬ 
cism of “ in our midst ”; and who does not long for a 
verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “ feel 
to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” 
says Coleridge, “ that so many religious persons of the 
present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of 
manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They 
must ‘ improve’ this and that text, and they must do so and 
so in a ‘ prayerful ’ way; and so on. A young lady urged 
upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were 
the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended 
her to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.” 
The language of prayer, both public and private, being 
made up more or less of technical expressions, tends con¬ 
tinually to become effete. The scriptural and other 
phrases, which were used with good taste and judgment 
several generations ago, may have lost their significance 
to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others 
which have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it 
has been truly said, are imperilled by the continued use 


♦Mill’s “Logic.” 


172 


words: their use and abuse. 


of conventional phraseology after the life of it has gone 
out, so that nothing in the real experience of the people 
responds to it, when they hear it or when they use it. 
Mr. Spurgeon, in his “ Lectures to Students,” remarks 
that “ ‘ the poor unworthy dust 1 is an epithet generally 
applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congre¬ 
gation, and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling; 
in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate. 
We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his 
children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded 
in the blinding influence of this expression, that he ex¬ 
claimed, ‘ 0 Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and 
thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘ I have 
taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust 
and ashes,’ the utterance was forcible and expressive; but 
in its misquoted, perverted, and abused form, the sooner 
it is consigned to its own element the better.” 

Many persons have vei*y erroneous ideas of what con¬ 
stitutes religious conversation. That is not necessarily 
religious talk which is interlarded with religious phrases, 
or which is solely about divine things; but that which is 
permeated with religious feeling, which is full of truth, 
reverence, and love, whatever the theme may be. Who 
has not heard some men talk of the most worldly things 
in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of 
spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting 
his whole spiritual being? And who has not heard other 
men talk about the divinest things in so dry, formal, and 
soulless a way that their words seemed a profanation, and 
chilled him to the core? It is almost a justification of 
slang that it is generally an effort to obtain relief from 
words worn bare by the use of persons who put neither 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 


173 


knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem inca¬ 
pable of expressing anything real. 

When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had 
recanted, she replied, “No; he has only canted .” Often, 
when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use lan¬ 
guage so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm than 
the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking upon 
this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of Bos¬ 
ton, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant and 

shams. “ There’s Dr.-,” said he, about the time of 

the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “ who went 
all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he 
should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he 
wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had an intense ab¬ 
horrence of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave 
expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was 
visiting him spent a day in sighing and in begging par¬ 
don for his suspirations, saying that they were caused by 
grief that he had so hard a heart. The great divine bore 
with him all the first day, but when the lamentations 
were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said: 
“Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensat¬ 
ing principle, and be thankful and still.” “ Compensating 
principle!” exclaimed the young man; “ what can compen¬ 
sate for a hard heart?” “ Why, a soft head, to be sure,” 
said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great provocation. 
Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A 
great many men would be positive forces of goodness in 
the world, if they did not let all their principles and 
enthusiasm escape in words. They are like locomotives 
which let off so much steam through the escape valves, 
that, though they fill the air with noise, they have not 



174 


words; their use and abuse. 


power enough left to move the train. There is hardly 
anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without 
deeds. “ The fluent boaster is not the man who is stead¬ 
iest before the enemy; it is well said to him that his cour¬ 
age is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of 
virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in 
the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; 
so much indignation as is expressed has found vent; it is 
wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; 
the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains 
that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.’' * 

“Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control 
That o’er thee swell and throng; 

They will condense within thy soul, 

And change to purpose strong. 

But he who lets his feelings run 
In soft luxurious flow, 

Shrinks when hard service must be done, 

And faints at every woe. 

Faith’s meanest deed more favor bears, 

Where hearts and wills are weigh'd, 

Than brightest transports, choicest prayers, 

Which bloom their hour and fade.” + 

It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle 
ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be tauglit 
a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, “I said, I will 
take heed to my ways, that I olfend not with my tongue,” 
he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically 
acquired. When asked six months, and again many years 
after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he 
answered that he had never been able truly to master 
this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love 
and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of 


* Sermons, by Rev. F. W. Robertson. 


t Professor J. H. Newman. 


WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. 175 

exhibiting on his cards “ J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,” 
and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief, 
with the words, “ Let us weep.” On the other hand, 
nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without 
attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,— to cheat 
one’s self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when 
no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that 
when good men who have no deep religious fervor use 
fervent language, which they have caught from others, 
or which was the natural expression of what they felt in 
other and better years,— above all, when they employ on 
mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been 
forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in 
the shock of conflict,— they cannot easily imagine what 
a disastrous impression they produce on keen and dis¬ 
criminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and 
the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of relig¬ 
ious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest 
and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep 
emotion commands respect; but intense words should 
never be used when the religious life is not intense. 
“ Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial 
acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single 
fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that 
the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the 
weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have 
conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, 
by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its 
end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the 
‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has found for itself a vent in 
words.” * 


*“Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson.” 


176 


words; their use and abuse. 


Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its 
cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. 
When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending 
the opera in Paris, he replied, “ I am embarrassed at 
listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Ger¬ 
many, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side 
of me is a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the 
music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a 
fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to 
me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very 
clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the 
gloss off my own impression,— if I have any.” 


CHAPTER VI. 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


He that hath knowledge spareth his words.— Proverbs xvii, 27. 

Learn the value of a man’s words and expressions, and you know him. . . 
He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great 
or small.— La vater. 

Words are women; deeds are men.— George Herbert. 

He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like 
the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.— Rat. 


HE old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing 



three languages that he used to declare that he had 
three hearts. The Emperor Charles V expressed himself 
still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to 
the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a 
man. Acpording to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who 
understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and 
spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many 
men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in 
ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest 
knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous lin¬ 
guistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of 
nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a 
higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blind¬ 
fold chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign 
languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused 
strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted 
no work of utility,— left no trace of his colossal powers; 
and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder 


178 


words; their use and abuse. 


at his gifts, as we wonder at the Belgian giant or a five¬ 
legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions, 
De Quincey suggests that the following would be an 
appropriate epitaph for his eminence: “Here lies a man 
who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,— abscond¬ 
ing from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot 
dictionary.” Enormous, however, as were the linguistic 
acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of 
his acquirements,— priding himself, as he did, less upon 
his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of 
a single tongue. “ What am I,” said he to a visitor, 
“but an ill-bound dictionary?” The saying of Catherine 
de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of 
linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood 
twenty different languages,—“That’s twenty words for 
one idea,” said she; “I had rather have twenty ideas for 
one word.” In this reply she foreshadowed the great 
error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the 
be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it 
should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the 
scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career 
that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the 
dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated 
man is too often one who knows more of language than 
of idea ,— more of the husk than of the kernel,— more 
of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has 
got together a heap of symbols,— of mere counters,—with 
which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; 
but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold 
of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has 
not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,— paper like bad 
scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless 


SOME ABUSES OE WOKDS. 


179 


in exchange, and repudiated in real traffic. The great 
scholar is often an intellectual miser, who expends the 
spiritual energy that might make him a hero upon the 
detection of a wrong dot, a false syllable, or an inaccurate 
word. 

In this country, where fluency of speech is vouchsafed 
in so large a measure to the people, and every third man 
is an orator, it is easier to find persons with the twenty 
words for one idea, than persons with twenty ideas for 
one word. Of all the peoples on the globe, except perhaps 
the Irish, Americans are the most spendthrift of language. 
Not only in our court-houses and representative halls, 
but everywhere, we are literally deluged with words,— 
words,— words. Everybody seems born to make long 
speeches, as the sparks to fly upward. The Aristotelian 
theory that Nature abhors a vacuum appears to be a 
universal belief, and all are laboring to fill up the realms 
of space with “mouthfuls of spoken wind.” The quantity 
of breath that is wasted at our public meetings,— religious, 
political, philanthropic, and literary,— is incalculable. 
Hardly a railroad or a canal is opened, but the occasion 
is seized on as a chance for speeches of “ learned length 
and thundering sound”; and even a new hotel cannot 
throw open its doors without an amount of breath being 
expended, sufficient, if economically used, to waft a boat 
across a small lake. 

One is struck, in reading the “ thrilling ” addresses on 
various occasions, which are said to have “ chained as with 
hooks of steel the attention of thousands,” and which 
confer on their authors “immortal reputations” that die 
within a year, to see what tasteless word-piling passes 
with many for eloquence. The advice given in Racine’s 


180 


words; their use and abuse. 


“ Plaideurs ,” by an ear-tortured judge to a long-winded 
lawyer, “to skip to the deluge,” might wisely be repeated 
to our thousand Ciceros and Chathams. The Baconian 
art of condensation seems nearly obsolete. Many of our 
orators are forever breaking butterflies on a wheel,— 
raising an ocean to drown a fly,— loading cannon to shoot 
at humming-birds. Thought and expression are sup¬ 
planted by lungs and the dictionary. Instead of great 
thoughts couched in a few close, home, significant sen¬ 
tences,— the value of a thousand pounds sterling of 
sense concentrated into a cut and polished diamond,— 
we have a mass of verbiage, delivered with a pompous 
elocution. Instead of ideas brought before us, as South 
expresses it, like water in a well, where you have fulness 
in a little compass, we have the same “ carried out into 
many petty, creeping rivulets, with length and shallow¬ 
ness together.” 

It is in our legislative bodies that this evil has reached 
the highest climax. A member may have a thought or a 
fact which may settle a question; but if it may be couched 
in a sentence or two, he thinks it not worth delivering. 
Unless he can wire-draw it into a two-hours speech, or at 
least accompany it with some needless verbiage to plump 
it out in the report, he will sit stock still, and leave the 
floor to men who have fewer ideas and more words at 
command. The public mind, too, revolts sometimes 
against nourishment in highly concentrated forms; it 
requires bulk as well as nutriment, just as hay, as well 
as corn, is given to horses, to distend the stomach, and 
enable it to act with its full powers. Then, again,— and 
this, perhaps, is one of the main causes of long-winded 
speeches,— there is a sort of reverence entertained for 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


181 


a man who can “spout” two or three hours on the 
stretch; and the wonder is heightened, if he does it 
without making a fool of himself. Nothing, however, 
can be more absurd than to regard mere volubility as 
a proof of intellectual power. So far is this from being 
the case that it may be doubted whether any large- 
thoughted man, who was accustomed to grapple with the 
great problems of life and society, ever found it easy 
upon the rostrum to deliver his thoughts with fluency 
and grace. 

Bruce, the traveller, long ago remarked of the Abyssin- 
ians, that “they are all orators, as,” he adds, “are most 
barbarians.” It is often said of such tonguey men that 
they have “ a great command of language,” when the 
simple fact is that language has a great command of 
them. As Whately says, they have the same command 
of language that a man has of a horse that runs away 
with him. A true command of language consists in the 
power of discrimination, selection, and rejection, rather 
than in that of multiplication The greatest orators ofj 
ancient and modern times have been remarkable for thei* 
economy of words. Demosthenes, when he 

“Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece 
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne, 1 ’ 

rarely spoke over thirty minutes, and Cicero took even 
less time to blast Catiline with his lightnings. There 
are some of the Greek orator’s speeches which were 
spoken, as they may now be read with sufficient slowness 
and distinctness, in less than half an hour; yet they are 
the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius the effect 
of whose words the ancients exhausted their language 
in describing; which they could adequately describe only 


182 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


by comparing it to the workings of the most subtle and 
powerful agents of nature,— the ungovernable torrent, 
the resistless thunder. Chatham was often briefer still, 
and Mirabeau, the master-spirit of the French tribune, 
condensed his thunders into twenty minutes. 

It is said that not one of the three leading members 
of the convention that formed the Constitutidn of the 
United States spoke, in the debates upon it, over twenty 
minutes. Alexander Hamilton was reckoned one of the 
most diffuse speakers of his day; yet he did not occupy 
more than two hours and a half in his longest arguments 
at the bar, nor did his rival, Aaron Burr, occupy over 
half that time. A judge who was intimately acquainted 
with Burr and his practice declares that he repeatedly 
and successfully disposed of cases involving a large 
amount of property in half an hour. “ Indeed,” says 
he, “ on one occasion he talked to the jury seven minutes 
in such a manner that it took me, on the bench, half an 
hour to straighten them out.” He adds: “ I once asked 
him, ‘Colonel Burr, why cannot lawyers always save the 
Time, and spare the patience of the court and jury, by 
dwelling only on the important points in their cases?’ 
to which Burr replied, ‘Sir, you demand the greatest 
faculty of the human mind, selection.’ ” To these ex¬ 
amples we may add that of a great English advocate. 
“ I asked Sir James Scarlett,” says Buxton, “ what was 
the secret of his preeminent success as an advocate. He 
replied that he took care to press home the one principal 
point of the case, without paying much regard to the 
others. He also said that he knew the secret of bemo- 

o 

short. ‘ I find,’ said he, ‘ that when I exceed half an hour, 
I am always doing mischief to my client. If I drive into 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


183 


the heads of the jury unimportant matter, I drive out 
matter more important that I had previously lodged 
there. 111 

Joubert, a French author, cultivated verbal economy 
to such an extreme that he tried almost to do without 
words. “ If there is a man on earth,” said he, “ tormented 
by the cursed desire to get a whole book into a page, a 
whole page into a phrase, and this phrase into one word,— 
that man is myself.” The ambition of many American 
speakers, and not a few writers, is apparently the reverse 
of this. We do not seem to know that in many cases, 
as Hesiod says, a half is more than the whole; and that 
a speech or a treatise hammered out painfully in every 
part is often of less value than a few bright links, sug¬ 
gestive of the entire chain of thought. Who wants to 
swallow a whole ox, in order to get at the tenderloin? 

Prolixity, it has been well said, is more offensive now 
than it once was, because men think more rapidly. They 
are not more thoughtful than their ancestors, but they 
are more vivid, direct, and animated in their thinking. 
They are more impatient, therefore, of long-windedness, 
of a loose arrangement, and of a heavy, dragging move¬ 
ment in the presentation of truth. “A century ago men 
would listen to speeches and sermons,— to divisions and 
subdivisions,— that now would be regarded as utterly 
intolerable. As the human body is whisked through space 
at the rate of a mile a minute, so the human mind travels 
with an equally accelerated pace. Mental operations are 
on straight lines, and are far more rapid than they once 
were. The public audience now craves a short method, 
a distinct, sharp statement, and a rapid and accelerating 
movement, upon the part of its teachers.” * It is, in 


*Shedd’s “Homiletics.' 


184 


words; their use and abuse. 


short, an age of steam and electricity that we live in, not 
of slow coaches; an age of locomotives, electric telegraphs, 
and phonography; and hence it is the cream of a speaker’s 
thoughts that men want,— the wheat, and not the chaff,— 
the kernel, and not the shell,—the strong, pungent essence, 
and not the thin, diluted mixture. The model discourse 
to-day is that which gives, not all that can be said, even 
well said, on a subject, but the very apices rerum , the tops 
and sums of things reduced to their simplest expression,— 
the drop of oil extracted from thousands of roses, and 
condensing all their odors,— the healing power of a hun¬ 
dred weight of bark in a few grains of quinine. 

“ Certainly the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever 
issued from the mind of man,” says South, “ have been 
couched under, and delivered in, a few close, home, and 
significant words. . . Was not the work of all the six 
days [of creation] transacted in so many words? . . . 
Heaven, and earth, and all the host of both, as it were, 
dropped from God’s mouth, and nature itself was but the 
product of a word. . . The seven wise men of Greece, 
so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired 
all that fame, each of them by a single sentence consisting 
of two or three words. And yvwfh <reaoTw still lives and 
flourishes in the mouths of all, while many vast volumes 
are extinct, and sunk into dust and utter oblivion.” 

Akin to the prolixity of style which weakens so many 
speeches, is the habitual exaggeration of language which 
deforms both our public and our private discourse. The 
most unmanageable of all parts of speech, with many 
persons, is the adjective. Voltaire has justly said that 
the adjectives are often the greatest enemies of the sub¬ 
stantives, though they may agree in gender, number, and 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


185 


case. Generally the weakness of a composition is just in 
proportion to the frequency with which this class of words 
is introduced. As in gunnery the force of the discharge 
is proportioned, not to the amount of powder that can be 
used, but to the amount that can be thoroughly ignited, 
so it is not the multitude of words, but the exact num¬ 
ber fired by the thought, that gives energy to expression. 
There are some writers and speakers who seem to have 
forgotten that there are three degrees of comparison. 
The only adjectives they ever use are the superlative, and 
even these are raised to the third power. With them 
there is no gradation, no lights and shadows. Every hill 
is Alpine, every valley Tartarean; every virtue is godlike, 
every fault a felony; every breeze a tempest, and every 
molehill a mountain. Praise or blame beggars their 
vocabulary; epithets are heightened into superlatives; 
superlatives stretch themselves into hyperboles; and 
hyperboles themselves get out of breath, and die asthmat¬ 
ically of exhaustion. 

Of all the civilized peoples on the face of the globe, 
our Hibernian friends excepted, Americans are probably 
the most addicted to this exaggeration of speech. As our 
mountains, lakes and rivers are all on a gigantic scale, 
we seem to think our speech must be framed after the same 
pattern. Even our jokes are of the most stupendous kind; 
they set one to thinking of the Alleghanies, or suggest 
the immensity of the prairies. A Western orator, in 
portraying the most trivial incident, rolls along a Missis- 
sippian flood of eloquence, and the vastness of his meta¬ 
phors makes you think you are living in the age of the 
megatheriums and saurians, and listening to one of a 
pre-Adamite race. Our political speeches, instead of being 


186 


words; their use and abuse. 


couched in plain and temperate language, too often 
bristle 

“With terms unsquared 

Which, from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped, 

Would seem hyperboles.” 

In ordinary conversation, such is our enthusiasm or our 
poverty of expression, that we cannot talk upon the most 
ordinary themes, except in the most extravagant and en¬ 
raptured terms. Everything that pleases us is positively 
“delicious,” “nice,” or “charming”; everything handsome 
is “elegant,” or “splendid”; everything that we dislike is 
“hateful,” “dreadful,” “ horrible,” or “shocking.” Listen 
to a circle of lively young ladies for a few minutes, and 
you will learn that, within the compass of a dozen hours, 
they have met with more marvellous adventures and hair¬ 
breadth escapes,— passed through more thrilling experi¬ 
ences, and seen more gorgeous spectacles,— endured more 
fright, and enjoyed more rapture,— than could be crowded 
into a whole life-time, even if spun out to threescore and 
ten. 

Ask a person what he thinks of the weather in a rainy 
season, and he will tell you that “ it rains cats and dogs,” 
or that “ it beats all the storms since the flood.” If his 
clothes get sprinkled in crossing the street, he has been 
“drenched to the skin.” All our winds blow a hurricane; 
all our fires are conflagrations,— even though only a hen¬ 
coop is burned; all our fogs can be cut with a knife. No¬ 
body fails in this country; he “ bursts up.” All our 
orators rival Demosthenes in eloquence; they beat Chil- 
lingworth in logic; and their sarcasm is more “withering” 
than that of Junius himself. Who ever heard of a pub¬ 
lic meeting in this country that was not “ an immense 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


187 


demonstration”; of an actor’s benefit at which the house 
was not “crowded from pit to dome”; of a political nomi¬ 
nation that was not “sweeping the country like wild-fire”? 
Where is the rich man who does not “roll in wealth”; 
or the poor man who is “worth the first red cent”? All 
our good men are paragons of virtue,— our villains, mon¬ 
sters of iniquity. 

Many of our public speakers seem incapable of express¬ 
ing themselves in a plain, calm, truthful manner on any 
subject whatever. A great deal of our writing, too, is 
pitched on an unnatural, falsetto key. Quiet ease of style, 
like that of Cowley’s “ Essays,” Goldsmith’s “ Vicar of 
Wakefield,” or White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” is 
almost a lost art. Our newspaper literature is becoming 
more and more sensational; and it seems sometimes as if 
it would come to consist of head-lines and exclamation 
points. Some of the most popular correspondents are 
those whose communications are a perfect florilegium of 
fine words. They rival the “ tulipomania” in their love of 
gaudy and glaring colors, and apparently care little how 
trite or feeble their thoughts may be, provided they have 
dragon-wings, all green and gold. It was said of Rufus 
Choate, whose brain teemed with a marvellous wealth of 
words, and who was very prodigal of adjectives, that he 
“drove a substantive-and-six” whenever he spoke in pub¬ 
lic, and that he would be as pathetic as the grand lamen¬ 
tations in “ Samson Agonistes ” on the obstruction of fish¬ 
ways, and rise to the cathedral music of the universe on 
the right to manufacture India-rubber suspenders. When 
Chief-Justice Shaw, before whom he had often pleaded, 
heard that there was a new edition of “Worcester’s Dic¬ 
tionary,” containing two thousand five hundred new words, 


188 


words; their use and abuse. 


he exclaimed, “ For heaven’s sake, don’t let Choate get hold 
of it!”* 

Even scientific writers, who might be expected to aim at 
some exactness, often caricature truth with equal grossness, 
describing microscopic things by colossal metaphors. Thus 
a French naturalist represents the blood of a louse as 
“rushing through his veins like a torrent!” Even in 
treating on this very subject of exaggeration, a writer in 
an English periodical, after rebuking sharply this Ameri¬ 
can fault, himself outrages truth by declaring that “ he 
would walk fifty miles on foot to see the man that never 
caricatures the subject on which he speaks!” To a critic 
who thus fails to reck his own rede, one may say with Sir 
Thomas Browne: “Thou who so hotly disclaimest the 
devil, be not thyself guilty of diabolism.” 

Seriously, when shall we have done with this habit of 
amplification and exaggeration,— of blowing up molehills 
into Himalayas and Chimborazos? Can anything be more 
obvious than the dangers of such a practice? Is it not 
evident that by applying super-superlatives to things petty 
or commonplace, we must exhaust our vocabulary, so that, 
when a really great thing is to be described, we shall be 
bankrupt of adjectives? It is true there is no more unpar¬ 
donable sin than dulness; but, to avoid being drowsy, it is 
not necessary that our “good Homers” should be always 
electrifying us with a savage intensity of expression. 
There is nothing of which a reader tires so soon as of a 
continual blaze of brilliant periods,— a style in which a 
“ qu'il mourut ” and a “let there be light” are crowded 

* Perhaps Choate justified himself by the authority of Burke, who some¬ 
times harnessed five adjectives to a noun; e.g., in his diatribe against the meta¬ 
physicians, he says: “Their hearts are like that of the principal of evil him¬ 
self,—incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.” 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


189 


into every line. On the other hand, there is nothing which 
adds so much to the beauty of style as contrast. Where 
all men are giants, there are no giants; where all is em¬ 
phatic in style, there is no emphasis. Travel a few months 
among the mountains, and you will grow as sick of the 
everlasting monotony of grandeur, of beetling cliffs and 
yawning chasms, as of an eternal succession of plains. 
Yet, in defiance of this obvious truth, the sensational 
writer thinks the reader will deem him dull unless every 
sentence blazes with meaning, and every paragraph is 
crammed with power. His intellect is always armed 
cap-a-pie, and every passage is an approved attitude of 
mental carte and tierce. If he were able to create a 
world, there would probably be no latent heat in it, and 
no twilight; and should he drop his pen and turn painter, 
his pictures would be all foreground, with no more 
perspective than those of the Chinese. 

De Quineey, speaking of the excitability of the French, 
says that, having appropriated all the phrases of passion 
to the service of trivial and ordinary life, they have no 
language of passion for the service of poetry, or of occa¬ 
sions really demanding it, because it has been already 
enfeebled by continual association with cases of an unim¬ 
passioned order. “Ah, Heavens!” or “0 my God!” are 
exclamations so exclusively reserved by the English for 
cases of profound interest that, on hearing a woman even 
utter such words, they look round expecting to see her 
child in some situation of danger. But in France “ del /” 
and “0 mon Dien!” are uttered by every woman if a 
mouse does but run across the floor. There is much 
suggestive truth in this. By the habitual use of strong 
language men may blunt and petrify their feelings, as 


190 


words: their use ahd abuse. 


surely as by the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants they 
may deaden the sensibility of the palate. “ Naturally the 
strongest word ought to be used to give expression to the 
strongest feeling. But strong words have been so blunted 
through frequent use that they have lost their sharp edge, 
and pass over our thick skin without even pricking our 
sensibility; while, at moments when we expect a heavy 
blow, the light tickling of the socially polite feather may 
far more vividly stimulate our sensibility.” 

It is a law of oratory, and indeed of all discourse, 
whether oral or written, that it is the subdued expression 
of conviction and feeling, when the speaker or writer, in¬ 
stead of giving vent to his emotions, veils them in part, 
and suffers only glimpses of them to be seen, that is the 
most powerful. It is the man who is all but mastered 
by his excitement, but who, at the very point of being 
mastered, masters himself,— apparently cool when he is 
at a white heat,— whose eloquence is most conquering. 
When the speaker, using a gentler mode of expression 
than the case might warrant, appears to stifle his feelings 
and studiously to keep them within bounds, a reaction is 
produced in the hearer’s mind, and, rushing into the 
opposite extreme, he is moved more deeply than by the 
most vehement and passionate declamation. The jets of 
flame that escape now and then,— the suppressed bursts 
of feeling,— the partial eruptions of passion,—are regarded 
as but hints or faint intimations of the volcano within. 
Balzac, in one of his tales, tells of an artist, who, by a 
few touches of his pencil, could give to a most common¬ 
place scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over 
the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of 
crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


191 


bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some death- 
struggle, over an undefined object which fancy whispers 
must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor you see a slipper, 
an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and these 
hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more 
powerfully than the most elaborate detail, because the 
imagination of man is more powerful than art itself. 
So with Hood’s description of the Haunted House:— 

“Over all there hung a cloud of fear; 

A sense of mystery the spirit daunted. 

And said, as plain as whisper to the ear, 

‘The place is haunted!’” 

Thoreau, describing an interview he had at Concord 
with John Brown, notices as one of the latter’s marked 
peculiarities, that he did not overstate anything, but spoke 
within bounds. “He referred to what his family had 
suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to 
his pent-up fire. It teas a volcano ivith an ordinary 
chimney-flue.' 1 ' 1 In one of the published letters of the late 
Rev. F. W. Robertson, there are some admirable comments 
on a letter, full of strongly expressed religious sentiments, 
pious resolutions, etc., which he had received from a 
fashionable lady. The letter, he says, “is in earnest so 
far as it goes; only that fatal facility of strong words 
expresses feeling which will seek for itself no other ex¬ 
pression. She believes or means what she says, but the 
very vehemence of the expression injures her, for really 
it expresses the penitence of a St. Peter, and would not 
be below the mark if it were meant to describe the bit¬ 
ter tears with which he bewailed his crime; but when 
such language is used for trifles, there remains nothing 
stronger for the awful crises of human life. It is like 


193 


words; their use and abuse. 


Draco’s code,— death for larceny; and there remains for 
parricide or treason only death.” 

Let ns then be as chary of our superlatives as of our 
Sunday suit. Hardly a greater mistake can be made in 
regard to expression, than to suppose that a uniform 
intensity of style is a proof of mental power. So far is 
this from being true, that it may safely be said that such 
intensity not only implies a want of truthfulness and sim¬ 
plicity, but even of earnestness and real force. Intensity 
is not a characteristic of nature, in spirit or in matter. 
The surface of the earth is not made up of mountains and 
valleys, but, for the most part, of gentle undulations. The 
ocean is not always in a rage, but, if not calm, its waves 
rise and fall with gentle fluctuation. Hurricanes and 
tempests are the extraordinary, not the usual, conditions 
of our atmosphere. Not only the strongest thinkers, but 
the most powerful orators, have been distinguished rather 
for moderation than for exaggeration in expression. The 
great secret of Daniel Webster’s strength as a speaker lay 
in the fact that he made it a practice to understate rather 
than to overstate his confidence in the force of his own 
arguments, and in the logical necessity of his conclusions. 
The sober and solid tramp of his style reflected the move¬ 
ments of an intellect that palpably respected the relations 
and dimensions of things, and to which exaggeration 
would have been an immorality. Holding that violence 
of language is evidence of feebleness of thought and 
lack of reasoning power, he kept his auditor constantly in 
advance of him, by suggestion rather than by strong assev¬ 
eration, and by calmly stating the facts that ought to 
move the hearer, instead of by making passionate appeals, 
the man being always felt to be greater than the man’s 


SOME ABUSES OF WORDS. 


193 


feelings. Such has been the method of all great rhetori¬ 
cians of ancient and modern times. 

The most effective speakers are not those who tell all 
they think or feel, but those who, by maintaining an 
austere conscientiousness of phrase, leave on their hearers 
the impression of reserved power. Great bastions of mili¬ 
tary strength must lie at rest in times of peace, that they 
may be able to execute their destructive agencies in times 
of war; and so let it be with the superlatives of our 
tongue. Never call on the “ tenth legion,” or “ the old 
guard,” except on occasions corresponding to the dignity 
and weight of those tremendous forces. Say plain things 
in a plain way, and then, when you have occasion to send 
a sharp arrow at your enemy, you will not find your 
quiver empty of shafts which you wasted before they 
were wanted. 

“You should not speak to think, nor think to speak; 

But words and thoughts should of themselves outwell 
From inner fulness; chest and heart should swell 
To give them birth. Better be dumb a week 
Than idly prattle; better in leisure sleek 
Lie fallow-minded, than a brain compel 
To wasting plenty that hath yielded well, 

Or strive to crop a soil too thin and bleak. 

One true thought, from the deepest heart upspringing, 

May from within a whole life fertilize; 

One true word, like the lightning sudden gleaming, 

May rend the night of a whole world of lies. 

Much speech, much thought, may often be but seeming, 

But in one truth might boundless ever lies.'’ 


CHAPTER VII. 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


I cannot admire the constant nse of French or Latin words, instead of 
your own vernacular. My Anglo-Saxon feelings are wounded to the quick . . . 
by such words as chagrin instead of “grief," malediction instead of “curse," 
etc.— Count De Montalembert, in letter to Mrs. Oliphant. 

The devil does not care for your dialectics and eclectic homiletics, or 
Germanic objectives and subjectives; but pelt him with Anglo-Saxon in the 
name of God, and he will shift his quarters.— Rev. C. II. Spurgeon. 

Words have their proper places, just like men; 

We listen to, not venture to reprove, 

Large language swelling under gilded domes, 

Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan.— Landor. 


TT is a question of deep interest to all public speakers 
and writers, and one which has provoked not a little 
discussion of late years, whether the Saxon or the Romanic 
part of our language should be preferred by those who 
would employ “ the Queen’s English" with potency and 
effect. Of late it has been the fashion to cry up the 
native element at the expense of the foreign; and among 
the champions of the former we may name Dr. Whewell, 

of Cambridge, and a modern rector of the University of 

Glasgow, whom De Quincey censures for an erroneous 

direction to the students to that effect. We may also 
add Lord Stanley,— one of the most brilliant and pol¬ 
ished speakers in the British Parliament,— who, in an 
address some years ago to the students of the same 

university, after expressing his surprise that so few per¬ 
sons, comparatively, in Great Britain, have acquainted 

themselves with the origin, the history, and the gradual 

194 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


195 


development of that mother tongue which is already 
spoken over half the world, which is destined to yet 
further geographical extension, and which embodies many 
of the noblest thoughts that have ever issued from the 
brain of man,— adds: “Depend upon it, it is the plain 
Saxon phrase, not the term borrowed from Greek or 
Roman literature, that, whether in speech or writing, goes 
straightest and strongest to men’s heads and hearts.” On 
the other hand “ the Opium-Eater,” commenting on a re¬ 
mark of Coleridge that Wordsworth's “Excursion” bristles 
beyond most poems with polysyllabic words of Greek or 
Latin origin, asserts that so must it ever be in meditative 
poetry upon solemn, philosophic themes. The gamut of 
ideas needs a corresponding gamut of expressions; the 
scale of the thinking, which ranges through every key, 
exacts for the artist an unlimited command over the 
entire scale of the instrument he employs. 

It has been computed, he adds, that the Italian opera 
has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary; 
so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so little are 
those emotions disposed to expand themselves into any 
variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that 
class of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs 
to the early ballad poetry. “ Pass from these narrow 
fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects 
are so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, 
to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which 
Shakespeare careers,— co-infinite with life itself,— yes, 
and with something more than life. Here is the other 
pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of 
diction? What is the lexis? Is it Saxon exclusively, or 
is it Saxon by preference? So far from that, the Latinity 


196 


words; their use and abuse. 


is intense,— not, indeed, in his construction, but in his 
choice of words; and so continually are these Latin words 
used, with a critical respect to their earliest (and where 
that happens to have existed, to their unfigurative) mean¬ 
ing, that, upon this one argument I would rely for upset¬ 
ting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to 
Shakespeare’s learning. . . These ‘ dictionary 1 words are 
indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by 
which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to 
subtlety of thinking, but also as to elevation and sub¬ 
limity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive 
thinker, as Shakespeare was; for the motions of his mind 
were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; 
not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things into 
its sphere; not multiform; repulsion was the law of his 
intellect,— he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely 
from this quality of grandeur,— unapproachable gran¬ 
deur,—his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity 
into his diction.” De Quincey concludes, therefore, that 
the true scholar will manifest a partiality for neither part 
of the language, but will be governed in his choice of 
words by the theme he is handling. 

This we believe to be the true answer to the question. 
The English language has a special dowry of power in 
its double-headed origin: the Saxon part of the language 
fulfils one set of functions; the Latin, another. Neither 
is good or bad absolutely, but only in its relation to its 
subject, and according to the treatment which the subject 
is meant to receive. The Saxon has nerve, terseness, and 
simplicity; it smacks of life and experience, and “puts 
small and convenient handles to things,— handles that 
are easy to grasp; ” but it has neither height nor breadth 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


197 


for every theme. To confine ourselves to it would be, 
therefore, a most egregious error. The truth is, it is no 
one element which constitutes the power and efficiency of 
our noble and expressive tongue, but the great multitude 
and the rich variety of the elements which enter into its 
composition. Its architectural order is neither Doric, 
Ionic, nor Corinthian, but essentially composite; a splen¬ 
did mosaic, to the formation of which many ancient and 
modern languages have contributed; defective in unity 
and symmetrical grace of proportion, but of vast resources 
and of immense power. With such a wealth of words at 
our command, to confine ourselves to the pithy but lim¬ 
ited Saxon, or to employ it chiefly, would be to practise 
a foolish economy,— to be poor in the midst of plenty, 
like the miser amid his money bags. All experiments 
of this kind will fail as truly, if not as signally, as that 
of Charles James Fox, who, an intense admirer of the 
Saxon, attempted to portray in that dialect the revolution 
of 1688, and produced a book which his warmest admirers 
admitted to be meagre, dry, and spiritless,— without pic¬ 
turesqueness, color, or cadence. 

It is true that within a certain limited and narrow 
circle of ideas, we can get along with Saxon words very 
well. The loftiest poetry, the most fervent devotion, 
even the most earnest and impassioned oratory, may all 
be expressed in words almost purely Teutonic; but the 
moment we come to the abstract and the technical,— to 
discussion and speculation,— we cannot stir a step with¬ 
out drawing on foreign sources. Simple narrative,— a 
pathos resting upon artless circumstances,— elementary 
feelings,— homely and household affections,— these are all 
most happily expressed by the old Saxon vocabulary; but 


198 


words: their use and abuse. 


a passion which rises into grandeur, which is complex, 
elaborate, and interveined with high meditative feelings, 
would languish or absolutely halt, without aid from the 
Romanic part of the vocabulary. If Anglo-Saxon is the 
framework or skeleton of our language, the spine on 
which the structure of our speech is hung,— if it is the 
indispensable medium of familiar converse and the busi¬ 
ness of life,— it no more fills out the full and rounded 
outline of our language, than the skeleton, nerves, and 
sinews form the whole of the human body. It is the 
classical contributions, the hundreds and thousands of 
Romanic words which during and since the sixteenth cen¬ 
tury have found a home in our English speech, that have 
furnished its spiritual conceptions, and endowed the mate¬ 
rial body with a living soul. 

These words would never have been adopted, had they 
not been absolutely necessary to express new modes and 
combinations of thought. As children of softer climes 
and gentler aspect than our harsh but pithy Teutonic 
terms, they have been received into the English family of 
words, and add grace and elegance to the speech that has 
adopted them. The language has gained immensely by 
the infusion, not only in richness of synonym and the 
power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, 
but, more than all, in light-footed polysyllables that trip 
singing to the music of verse. If the saying of Shake¬ 
speare, that 

“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,” 

is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin 
words, would not the fine thought that 

“Nice customs courtesy to kings,” 

be greatly injured by substituting any other words for 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


199 


“nice” and “courtesy”? Because Shakespeare’s “oak¬ 
cleaving thunderbolts” is so admirable, shall we fail to 
appreciate Milton’s “ fulmined over Greece,” where the 
idea of flash and reverberation is conveyed, without that 
of riving and shattering? It has been observed that 
Wordsworth’s famous ode, “ Intimations of Immortality,” 
translated into “ Hints of Deathlessness,” would hiss like 
an angry gander. Instead of Shakespeare’s 

“Age cannot wither her, 

Nor custom stale her infinite variety,” 

say “ her boundless manifoldness,” and would not the sen¬ 
timent suffer in exact proportion with the music? With 
what terms equally expressive would you supply the place 
of such words as the long ones blended with the short in 
the exclamation of the horror-stricken Macbeth? — 

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? No! this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous sea incarnadine, 

Making the green one red.” 

As the poet Lowell justly asks, could anything be more 
expressive than the huddling epithet which here implies 
the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time 
pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than 
does Aeschylus its rippling sunshine? “‘Multitudinous 
sea,’—what an expression! You feel the wide weltering 
waste of confused and tumbling waves around you in 
that single word. What beauty and wealth of color too 
in ‘ incarnadine,’ a word capable of dyeing an ocean! and 
then, after these grand polysyllables, how terse and stern 
comes in the solid Saxon, as if a vast cloud had condensed 
into great heavy drops,— the deep one red.”* Is it not 
plain that if you substitute any less massive words for the 


* W. W. Story. 


200 


words; their use and abuse. 


sesquipedalia verba , the sonorous terms “multitudinous” 
and “incarnadine,” the whole grandeur of the passage 
would collapse at once? 

Among the British orators of this century few have 
had a greater command of language, or used it with nicer 
discrimination, than Canning. What can be happier than 
the blending of the native and the foreign elements in 
the following eloquent passage? Most of the italicized 
words are Saxon: 

“Our present repose is no more a proof of our inability to act than the 
state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses 
that float, in the waters above your toivn is a proof that they are devoid of 
strength or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know, gentlemen, 
how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in 
perfect stillness — how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it 
would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion— 
how soon it would ruffle , as it were, its swelling plumage —how quickly it would 
put forth all its beauty and its bravery , collect its scattered elements of strength, 
and aivake its dormant thunders. Such as is one of those magnificent machines 
when springing from inaction into a display of its strength, such is England 
itself, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently causes her power 
to be put forth on an adequate occasion.” 

In the famous passage in Sterne's “Tristram Shandy,” 
which has been pronounced the most musical in our lan¬ 
guage, nearly all the words are Saxon: 

“The accusing spirit that flew up to Heaven's chancery with the oath, 
blushed as he gave it in, and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped 
a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever.” 


On the other hand, in the following passage from 
Napier’s history of the Peninsular War,— in which the 
impetuosity of the style almost rivals that of the soldiers it 
describes, and in reading which we seem almost to hear the 
tramp and the shouts of the charging squadrons, and the 
sharp rattle of the musketry,— how indispensable to the 
effect of the description are the Romance words, which we 
have italicized: 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC ? 


201 


“ Suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies; and 
then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In 
vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the 
hardiest veterans , extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice 
their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in 
vain did the mass itself bear up, and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately 
upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to 
charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry, no 
sudden burst of undisciplined valor, no nervous enthusiasm , weakened the sta¬ 
bility of their order-, their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their 
front ; their measured tread shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept 
away the head of every formation-, their deafening shouts overpowered the 
different cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as, foot by 
foot, and with a horrid carnage , it was driven by the incessant vigor of the 
attack to the furthest edge of the hill. In vain did the French reserves, joining 
with the struggling multitudes , endeavor to sustain the fight; their efforts only 
increased the irremediable confusion, and the mighty mass, giving way like a 
loosened cliff, went headlong down the ascent. The rain poured after in streams 
discolored with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six 
thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal field,” 


It is true, as we have already said, that the Saxon has 
the advantage of being the aboriginal element, the basis, 
and not the superstructure, of the language; it is the dia¬ 
lect of the nursery, and its words therefore, being conse¬ 
crated to the feelings by early use, are full of secret 
suggestions and echoes, which greatly multiply their power. 
Its words, though not intrinsically, yet to us, from associa¬ 
tion, are more concrete and pictorial than those derived 
from the Latin; and this is particularly true of many beau¬ 
tiful words we have lost. Iiow much more expressive to 
us is “sea-robber” than “pirate”; “sand-waste” than 
“desert”; “eye-bite” than “fascinate”; “mill-race” than 
“ channel ”; “ water-fright ” than “ hydrophobia ”; “ moon- 
ling ” than “ lunatic ”; “ show-holiness ” than “ hypocrisy ”; 
“in-wit” than “conscience”; “gold-hoard” than “treas¬ 
ure”; “ship-craft” than “the art of navigation”; “hand- 
cloth ” than “ towel ”; “ book-craft ” than “ literature ”! 
Therefore, as He Quincey says, “ wherever the passion of a 
poem is of that sort which uses, presumes , or postulates the 


202 words; their use and abuse. 

ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the 
‘cocoon’ (to speak by the language applied to silk-worms), 
which the poem spins for itself. But on the other hand, 
where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, 
where (as in religious or meditative poetry,— Young’s, for 
instance, or Cowper’s) the pathos creeps and kindles under¬ 
neath the very tissues of the thinking,— there the Latin will 
predominate; and so much so that, while the flesh, the 
blood, and the muscle will be often almost exclusively Latin, 
the articulations only, or hinges of connection, will be 
Anglo-Saxon.” 

Let us be thankful, then, that our language has other 
elements than the Saxon, admirable as that is. The circum¬ 
stances under which this element had its origin were such 
as to impart strength rather than beauty or elegance. The 
language of our continental forefathers was the language 
of fierce barbarians, hemmed in by other barbarous tribes, 
and having no intercourse with foreign nations, except 
when roving as sea wolves to plunder and destroy. It was 
the speech of a taciturn people living only in gloomy 
forests and on stormy seas, and was naturally, therefore, 
harsh and monosyllabic. It was full, nevertheless, of pithy, 
bold, and vigorous expressions, and needed only that its 
hardy stock should receive the grafts of sunnier and softer 
climes, to bear abundant and beautiful fruit. Let us be 
thankful that this union took place. Let us be grateful for 
that inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by engrafting 
our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dialect of Normandy, 
caused ultimately the whole opulence of Roman, and even 
of Grecian thought, to play freely through the veins of our 
native tongue. No doubt the immediate result was any¬ 
thing but pleasant. For a long time after the language 


SAXON" WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


203 


was thrown again into the crucible, Britons, Saxons and 
Normans talked a jargon fit neither for gods nor men. It 
was a chaos of language, hissing, sputtering, bubbling like 
a witch’s caldron. But luckily the Saxon element was yet 
plastic and unfrozen, so that the new elements could fuse 
with its own, thus forming that wondrous instrument of 
expression which we now enjoy, fitted fully to reflect the 
thoughts of the myriad-minded Shakespeare, yet, at the 
same time, with enough remaining of its old forest stamina 
for imparting a masculine depth to the sublimities of 
Milton or the Hebrew prophets, and to the Historic Scrip¬ 
tures that patriarchal simplicity which is one of their 
greatest charms. 

We are aware that, in reply to all this, it may be 
asked, “Are not ninety-three words out of every hundred 
in the Bible Anglo-Saxon; and where are the life, beauty 
and freshness of our language to be found in so heaped 
a measure as in that ‘pure well of English,’ the Bible?” 
Nothing can be plainer or simpler than its vocabulary, 
yet how rich is it in all that concerns the moral, the 
spiritual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity! 
Is it logic that we ask? What a range of abstract 
thought, what an armory of dialectic weapons, what an 
enginery of vocal implements for moving the soul, do 
we find in the epistles of St. Paul! Is it rhetoric that 
we require? “Where,” in the language of South, “do 
we find such a natural prevailing pathos as in the lam¬ 
entations of Jeremiah? One would think that every letter 
was written with a tear, every word was the noise of a 
breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted 
of sorrow, disciplined to grief from his infancy, one who 
never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan.” 


204 


words; their use and abuse. 


Yet, while our translation owes much of its beauty to 
the Saxon, there are passages the grandeur of which 
would be greatly diminished by the substitution of Saxon 
words for the Latin ones. In the following the Latin 
words italicized are absolutely necessary to preserve one 
of the sublimest rhythms of the Bible: “And I heard, 
as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the 
voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thun- 
derings, saying, ‘ Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent 
reigneth .’ ” 

The truth is, the translators of the Bible, while they 
have employed a large percentage of Saxon words, have 
hit the golden mean in their version, never hesitating to 
use a Latin word when the sense or the rhythm demanded 
it; and hence we have the entire volume of revelation 
in the happiest form in which human wit and learning 
have ever made it accessible to man. This an English 
Catholic writer, a convert from the Anglican church, has 
mournfully acknowledged, in the following touching pas¬ 
sage:—“Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and 
marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is one of 
the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives 
on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, 
like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly 
knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be 
almost things rather than mere words. It is part of 
the national mind, and the anchor of national serious¬ 
ness. . . The memory of the dead passes into it. The 
potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. 
The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden 
beneath its words. It is the representative of his best 
moments, and all that there has been about him of soft 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


205 


and gentle, and pure and penitent and good, speaks to 
him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred 
thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy 
never soiled. . . In the length and breadth of the land 
there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness 
about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon 
Bible.”* 

It is a very striking and suggestive fact that those 
very writers who award the palm for expressiveness to 
the Saxon part of our language, cannot extol the. Saxon 
without the help of Latin words. Dr. Gregory tells us 
that when, in the company of Robert Hall, he chanced 
to use the term “ felicity ” three or four times in rather 
quick succession, the latter asked him: “Why do you say 
‘ felicity ’ ? * Happiness ’ is a better word, more musical, 

and genuine English, coming from the Saxon.” “Not 
more musical,” said Dr. Gregory. “ Yes, more musical, 
— and so are all words derived from the Saxon, generally. 
Listen, sir: ‘ My heart is smitten, and withered like 
grass.’ There is plaintive music. Listen again, sir: 
‘ Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.’ There is 
cheerful music.” “Yes, but ‘rejoice’ is French.” “True, 
but all the rest is Saxon; and ‘rejoice’ is almost out of 
time with the other words. Listen again: ‘Thou hast 
delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and 
my feet from falling.’ All Saxon, sir, except ‘delivered.’ 
I could think of the word ‘ tear’ till I wept.” But whence 
did Robert Hall get the words “ musical ” and “ plaintive 
music”? Are they not from the Greek and the French? 
Is not this stabbing a man with his own weapons? It 
is a curious fact, that, in spite of this eulogy on Saxon 

*F. W. Faber, in “Dublin Review,” June, 1853. 


206 


words; their use and abuse. 


words, a more than ordinary percentage of the words 
used in Mr. Hall’s writings are of Romanic origin. 
Again, even Macaulay, one of the most brilliant and 
powerful of all English writers, finds it impossible to 
laud the Saxon part of the language without borrowing 
nearly half the words of his famous panegyric from the 
Romanic part of the vocabulary. In his article on Bun- 
yan, in a passage written in studied commendation of 
the “pure old Saxon” English, we find, omitting the 
particles and wheelwork, one hundred and twenty-one 
words, of which fifty-one, or over forty-two per cent, 
are classical or alien. In other words, this great English 
writer, than whom few have a more imperial command 
over all the resources of expression, finds the Saxon 
insufficient for his eloquent eulogy on Saxon, and is 
obliged to borrow four-tenths of his words, and those the 
most emphatic ones, from the imported stock! 

It is an important fact, that while we can readily frame 
a sentence wholly of Anglo-Saxon, we cannot do so with 
words entirely Latin, because the determinative particles,— 
the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure,— must be 
Saxon. Macaulay, in his famous contrast of Dr. Johnson’s 
conversational language with that of his writings, has 
vividly illustrated the superiority of a Saxon-English to a 
highly Latinized diction. “ The expressions which came 
first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. 
When lie wrote for publication, he did his sentences out 
of English into Johnsonese. 1 When we were taken up 
stairs,’ says he in one of his letters from the Hebrides, 
‘a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of 
us was to lie.’ This incident is recorded in his published 
Journey as follows: ‘Out of one of the beds on which 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


207 


we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man as 
black as a Cyclops from the forge.’ Sometimes,” Macaulay 
adds, “Johnson translated aloud. ‘The Rehearsal,’ he said, 
‘has not wit enough to keep it sweet;’ then, after a pause, 
‘ It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putre¬ 
faction.’ ” Doubtless Johnson, like Robertson, Hume, and 
Gibbon, thought that he was refining the language by 
straining it through the lees of Latin and Greek, so as to 
imbue it with the tone and color of the learned tongues, 
and clear it of the barbarous Saxon; while real purity 
rather springs from such words as are our own, and 
peculiar to our fatherland. Nevertheless, the elephantine 
diction of the Doctor proved, in the end, a positive bless¬ 
ing to the language; for by pushing the artificial or 
classic system to an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, 
and led men to cultivate again the native idiom. 

In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we 
would say to every young writer: Give no fantastic 
preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings 
on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you 
can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an 
affluence of synonyms and a nicety of discrimination which 
no homogeneous tongue can boast. To know how to use 
each in due degree, and on proper occasions,— when to 
aim at vigor and when at refinement of expression,— to 
be energetic without coarseness, and polished without 
affectation,— is the highest proof of a cultivated taste. 
Never use a Romanic word when a Teutonic one will do 
as well; for the former carries a comparatively cold and 
conventional signification to an English ear. Between the 
sounding Latin and the homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is 
often as much difference in respect to a power of awaken- 


208 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


ing associations, as between a gong and a peal of village 
bells. Pleasant though it be to read the pages of one 
who writes in a foreign tongue, as it is pleasant to visit 
distant lands, yet there is always the charm of home, with 
all its witchery, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of our fathers. 
Of the words that we heard in our childhood, there are 
some which have stored up in them an ineffable sweet¬ 
ness and flavor, which make them precious ever after; 
there are Others which are words of might, of power,— 
old, brawny, large-meaning words, heavily laden with 
associations,— which, when they strike the imagination, 
awaken tender and tremulous memories, obscure, subtle, 
and yet most powerful. The orator and the poet can 
never employ these terms without great advantage; their 
very sound is often a spell “to conjure withal.” Our 
language is essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it 
is thoroughly so; all its grammatical forms, all its most, 
common and necessary words, are still identical with that 
old mother tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips 
of Arminius and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and 
of Harold of England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles 
the Great. On the other hand, never scruple to use a 
Romanic word when the Saxon will not do as well; that 
is, do not over-Teutonize from any archaic pedantry, but 
use the strongest, the most picturesque, or the most 
beautiful word, from whatever source it may come. The 
Latin words, though less home-like, must nevertheless be 
deemed as truly denizen in the language as the Saxon,— 
as being no alien interlopers, but possessing the full right 
of citizenship. Some of them came so early into the lan¬ 
guage, and are, therefore, so thoroughly naturalized, that 
we hardly recognize them as foreign words, unless our 


SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 


209 


attention is particularly called to their origin. When a 
person speaks of “ paying money ” or “ paying a debt,” we 
are no more sensible of an exotic effect than if he had 
spoken of “ eating bread,” “ drinking water,” or “ riding a 
horse.” That “pay” is derived from pacare, “debt” from 
debitum , or “ money ” from (Juno) Moneta, scarcely suggests 
itself even to the scholar. Perhaps of all our writers 
Shakespeare may be deemed, in this matter of the choice 
of words, the student’s best friend. No one better knows 
how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost 
resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weak¬ 
ness; and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar 
themes he uses simple words, and shows, by his total 
abstinence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful 
passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of 
our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it is on the broad 
pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and we shall 
find, if we regard him closely, that every feather is plucked 
from its wing. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 

Le style c’est de l’homme.— Buffon. 

Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; 
therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his 
thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble 
soul. — Goethe. 

No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.— 
Ruskin. 

TT was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that 
language was given to man to conceal his thought. 
There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to 
be of the same opinion,— sham philosophers for the most 
part, who have an ambition to be original without the 
capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the 
clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects 
look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “ loom up through 
the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence 
that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is 
sometimes called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant 
that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and 
all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly 
a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these 
shallow-profound authors, “ What a pity that So-and-so 
does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible 
English!”—whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and 
obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes 
the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The sim¬ 
ple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the 

210 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


211 


clearest, and the chiciro-oscuro which these transcendental- 
ists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind 
cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intel¬ 
lectual nakedness,— the convenient shelter for meagreness 
of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and 
shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is 
it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably 
indicates the shallow. 

But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our 
ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, 
there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times 
inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us 
in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them 
for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render 
them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, 
the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, 
they have swept by him,— thoughts so swift and so many- 
hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed 
like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some 
subject in one’s study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind 
has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to 
feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to 
embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thou¬ 
sand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we 
cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear 
to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float 
by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. 
Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expres¬ 
sion, who was able to condense into one word, that fell 
like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, expe¬ 
rienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid 
declamation: 


212 


words; their use and abuse. 


41 Could 1 embody and unbosom now 
That which is most within me,— could I wreak 
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw 
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, 

All that 1 would have sought, and all I seek, 

Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,— into one word, 

And that one word were lightning, I would speak; 

But, as it is, I live and die unheard. 

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.” 

So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains: 

4 ‘I sometimes hold it half a sin 
To put in words the grief I feel; 

For words, like Nature, half reveal, 

And half conceal the soul within.” 

De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have 
not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly 
developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, 
but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melo¬ 
dies in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from 
harp or organ. 

“The sea of thought is a boundless sea, 

Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach; 

The waves that would tell of the mystery 
Die and fall on the shore of speech.” 

“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “ is vast as 
the air; it embraces far more than languages can express; 
— or rather, languages express nothing, they only make 
thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the 
hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, 
which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning- 
like rapidity.” 

The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a 
class of persons who have conception without expression,— 
gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who 
have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when 
they would put them into language. Such men they term 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


213 


men of “ passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass, 
absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any 
for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “ the dumb 
ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of 
high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. 
The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, 
in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there 
are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, 
however “ well-languaged ” the thinker may be. 

It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet char¬ 
acterizes it, “la pensee devenue mature ”; for the very 
expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing 
but symbols,— imperfect, too, at best,— and to make the 
symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring 
down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true 
that our words mean more than it is in their power to 
express,— shadow forth far more than they can define; 
yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is 
much which they fail, not only to express, but even to 
hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet 
of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathe¬ 
matics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, 
though produced forever, does not cut it, language can 
never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, 
even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of lan¬ 
guage enables man to reveal the features of the mystic 
Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which 
hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath 
ever lifted my veil.” 

“Full oft 

Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force 
Which thunders down the echo it creates; 

Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show 
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.” 


214 


words; their use and abuse. 


Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in 
the lines of Boileau: 

“Selon que notre idee est plus ou inoins obscure, 

L’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure; 

Ce que Ton concoit bien s’enonce clairement, 

Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement.’’ 

In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great 
poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of 
wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inade¬ 
quacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general 
thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; 
that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; 
and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the 
fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient 
genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, 
his native language is to the writer. The finest instru¬ 
ments are dumb till those melodies are put into them 
of which they can be only the passive conductors. The 
most powerful and most polished language must be 
wielded by the master before its full force can be known. 
The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the 
mother tongue of every one of his audience; but “who 
among them could have answered him in a single sen¬ 
tence like his own? Who among them could have 
guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken 
it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So 
with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities 
for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, 
indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagi¬ 
nation, which some English author has not treated in 
his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy 
of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of 
discrimination, and a strength and force of expression, 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


215 


which fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there 
not something almost like sorcery in the potent spell 
which some of these mighty magicians of language are 
able to exercise over the soul? Yet the right arrange¬ 
ment of the right words is the whole secret of the 
witchery,—a charm within the reach of any one of equal 
genius. Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel 
them deeply, and you will not often complain of the 
barrenness of language. You will find it abounding in 
riches,— exuberant beyond the demand of your intensest 
thought. “ The statue is not more surely included in the 
block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utter¬ 
ance in ‘ Webster’s Unabridged.’ ” As Goethe says: 

“ Be thine to seek the honest gain. 

No shallow-sounding fool; 

Sound sense finds utterance for itself, 

Without the critic’s rule; 

If to your heart* your tongue he true, 

Why hunt for words with much ado?” 

But we hear some one say,— is this the only secret of 
apt words? Is nothing more necessary to be done by 
one who would obtain a command of language? Does not 
Dr. Blair tell us to study the “ Spectator,” if we would 
learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too, declare 
that “ whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar 
but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give 
his days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes, 
and it is a pity that Johnson did not act upon his own 
advice. That it is well for a writer to familiarize him¬ 
self with the best models of style (models sufficiently 
numerous to prevent that mannerism which is apt to 
result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar 
with but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary 


216 


words; their use and abuse. 


depends largely on the company he keeps; and without a 
proper vocabulary no man can be a good writer. Words 
are the material that the author works in, and he must 
use as much care in their selection as the sculptor in 
choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors. 
By listening to those who speak well, by profound study 
of the masterpieces of literature, by exercises in transla¬ 
tion, and, above all, by frequent and careful practice in 
speaking and writing, he may not only enrich his vocab¬ 
ulary, learn the secret of the great writer’s charm, and 
elevate and refine his taste as he can in no other way, 
but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall be¬ 
come, at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient 
to the lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and 
telling, will then flow spontaneously, though the result 
of the subtlest art, like the waters of our city fountains, 
which, with much toil and at great expense, are carried 
into the public squares, yet appear to gush forth natu¬ 
rally. But to suppose that a good style can be acquired 
by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one 
of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a 
supposition is based on the notion that fine writing is an 
addition from without to the matter treated of,— a kind 
of ornament superinduced, or luxury indulged in, by one 
who has sufficient genius; whereas the brilliant or power¬ 
ful writer is not one who has merely a copious vocabulary, 
and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases 
and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something 
to say, and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off 
his compositions at a heat, or elaborates them with fas¬ 
tidious nicety and care, he has but one aim, which he 
keeps steadily before him, and that is to give forth what 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


217 


is in him. From this very earnestness it follows that, 
whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the harmony 
of his style,— whether it blaze with the splendors of a 
gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical 
surprises,— he never makes these an end, but has always 
the charm of an incommunicable simplicity. 

Such a person “ writes passionately because he feels 
keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too 
clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can 
analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces 
it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent; 
he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. 
When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; 
when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He 
always has the right word for the right idea, and never 
a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words 
suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has 
its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march 
of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, bujfc' what 
all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among 
the people, and his phrases become household words and 
idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the 
rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands 
the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and 
pavements of modern palaces.” * 

It follows from all this that there is no model style, 
and that the kind of style demanded in any composition 
depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of 
good writing is that it should be an expression of a man’s 
self,— a reflected image of his own character. If we know 
what the man is, we know what his style should be. If it 

*“The Idea of a University,” by J. H. Newman. 


218 


words; their use and abuse. 


mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is not 
a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its periods, 
or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries of 
expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us 
in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily, 
termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth 
long ago declared, the incarnation of thought. In Greek, 
the same word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,— and 
why? Because they cannot be divided; because thought 
and expression are one. They each co-exist, not one with 
the other, but in and through the other. Not till we can 
separate the soul and the body, life and motion, the convex 
and concave of a curve, shall we be able to divorce thought 
from the language which only can embody it. But allow¬ 
ing, for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing of 
ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think 
of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are 
certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility, 
simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess, 
just as all good clothing will have certain qualities in com¬ 
mon. But for all men to clothe their thoughts in the same 
manner would be as foolish as for a giant to array himself 
in the garments of a dwarf, a stout man in those of a thin, 
or a brunette in those of a blonde. Robert Hall, when 
preaching in early life at Cambridge, England, for a short 
time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it. “ I 
might as well have attempted,” said he, “ to dance a horn¬ 
pipe in the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My 
puny thoughts could not sustain the load of words in which 
I tried to clothe them.” 

It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the 
human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


219 


obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never 
two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are 
very slight,— so minute and subtle, as almost to defy char¬ 
acterization; yet, like the differences in musical styles 
which closely resemble each other, they are felt by the dis¬ 
cerning reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely 
mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of 
similar natures will have similar styles; but think of 
Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that 
of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker’s style as slip¬ 
shod,— of Dryden’s as feeble and obscure,— of Gibbon’s as 
mean and vulgar,— of Burke’s as timid and creeping,— of 
Carlyle’s as dainty and mincing,— of Emerson’s as diffuse 
and pointless,— or of Napier’s as lacking picturesqueness, 
verve, and fire? 

There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, 
whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a 
level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air 
by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant, 
that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over 
all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the 
echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one place, and 
shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unforda- 
ble, and there full of sand bars,— now hurrying on with 
rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed 
with forests and overhung with hills; another, always 
brimming with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, 
which rolls onward the same vast volume, with no apparent 
diminution, from Cairo to New Orleans. “ Sydney Smith, 
concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition 
which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how 
would Lord Bacon look in Smith’s sentences? How grandly 


220 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 

the soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and 
labyrinths of his involved and magnificent diction, waking 
musical echoes at every new turn and variation of its 
progress; but how could the thought of such a light tri- 
fler as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze, without 
being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly 
language of John Locke could hardly be translated into 
the terminology of Kant,— would look out of place in the 
rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin’s periods,— and 
would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart.”* 
Not only has every original writer his own style, which 
mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age 
differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well 
said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as 
men wrote in the time of Louis XIY, their style would 
lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the 
same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A 
woman who should write like Madame S6vign6 would be 
ridiculous, because she is not Madame S6vigne. The more 
one’s writing smacks of his own character and of the 
manners of his time, the more widely must his style diverge 
from that of the writers who were models only because 
they excelled in manifesting in their works either the 
manners of their own age or their own character. Who 
would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, how¬ 
ever successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mel¬ 
lifluous lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods 
of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be 
dense with meaning and full of color; it must be sugges¬ 
tive, sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old 
masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert 

♦“Essays and Reviews,” by Edwin P Whipple. 


THE SECRET OF APT AVORDS. 


221 


says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the 
best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with man¬ 
ners,— “ Le bon gout lui-meme , en ce cas , permet qu'on 
s'dcarte du meilleur gout , car le gout change avec les 
mceurs , meme le bon gouty 

Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for 
style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will 
result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive 
language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, 
is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer 
has his own ideas and feelings,— his own conceptions, 
judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,— which are 
personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his 
looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. 
If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has 
a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the 
beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force 
and keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged 
in his language. It follows, therefore, as Ruskin says, 
that all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral: 
it becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear, 
if he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; 
powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense 
of rhythm and order. 

This sensibility of language to the impulses and qual¬ 
ities of him who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating 
itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and 
aspirations which, pass within him, so as to become the 
faithful expression of his personality, indicating the very 
pulsating and thi'obbing of his intellect, and attending 
on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow; 
and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where 


222 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language, 
to suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey, 
and to give forth an aroma which no analysis of word 
or expression reveals,— is one of the marvels of human 
speech. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by 
another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own 
way, but is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of 
sentence and turns of expression, confesses his barrenness. 
The only way to make another’s style one’s own is to 
possess one’s self of his mind and soul. If we would 
reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we must first 
acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,” 
says Goldwin Smith, “ is not a musical instrument into 
which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones 
are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought; 
and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence 
is always the glow of truth.” As Sainte-Beuve says of 
the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s style,—“ Pre- 
tendre imiter le precede de diction da keros qui sut 
abreger Caesar lui-meme . . . il convient d’avoir fait 
d’aussi grandes choses pour avoir le droit d'etre aussi nu .” 

It is not imitation, but general culture,— as another 
has said, the constant submission of a teachable, appre¬ 
hensive mind to the influence of minds of the highest 
order, in daily life and books,— that brings out upon 
style its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitage. “So 
in the making of a fine singer, after the voice has been 
developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have been 
learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But 
the frequent hearing of the best music given by the best 
singers and instrumentalists,— the living in an atmos¬ 
phere of art and literature,— will develop and perfect a 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


223 


vocal style in one who has the gift of song; and, for any 
other, all the instruction of all the musical professors 
that ever came out of Italy will do no more than teach 
an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.” * 

The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic 
word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over 
that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave 
in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression; 
for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes 
master of the word fitted to express it, while he who has 
but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of 
language the secret of that inspiration which should be in 
himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies 
not in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”—not 
in having a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for 
every idea,— but in having something that you earnestly 
wish to say, and making the parts of speech vividly con¬ 
scious of it. Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said 
of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, 
because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch 
a grace of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of 
others. So he who has thoroughly possessed himself of 
his thought will not have to hunt through his dictionary 
for apt and expressive words,— a method which is but an 
outside remedy for an inward defect,— but will find lan¬ 
guage eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say, 

“Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear,” 

and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble 
and airy servitors, will tfip about him at command, and, 
in well-ordered files, fall aptly into their own places.” 


* “ Words and Their Uses,” by Richard Grant White. 


224 


words; their use and abuse. 


It was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced 
him to say what he would not, though he had forced many 
a word to say what it would not; and so will every writer, 
who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme, 
be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret of 
power or pathos. 

The question has been sometimes discussed whether the 
best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass, 
only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it 
imparts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There 
are those who hold that when language is simply trans¬ 
parent,— when it comes to us so refined of all its dross, 
so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it 
as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness 
in all its proportions,—we are at the very summit of the 
literary art. This is the character of Southey’s best prose, 
and of Paley’s writing, whose statement of a false theory 
is so lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers, 
however, who charm us by their language, apart from the 
ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume 
about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but 
for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a 
beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has 
not admired, independently of the sense, its “jewels, five 
words long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time, 
sparkle forever”? There are passages in which the mere 
cadence of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear, 
though we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious 
of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels 
when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a 
brook tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. 
Sir Philip Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


225 


Chase without his blood being stirred as by the sound of 
a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two 
verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he never re¬ 
peated particular lines of delicate modulation without a 
shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not 
sensible of certain magical effects, altogether distinct from 
the thoughts, in some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s 
“ Nightingale,” and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas 
Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey? 

Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is,' undoubtedly, 
the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted 
whether vividness, which was the ruling conception of the 
Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite 
as essential. Style, it has been well said, “ is not only a 
medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the 
thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be 
seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be 
visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only 
be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must 
be bounded and defined by sharply cut lines.” * 

A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet 
the thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The 
highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained 
only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme, 
and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite 
material through which we gaze from our windows on 
the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after 
undergoing the furnace,— as it was melted by fire before 
the rough particles of sand disappeared,— so it is with 
language. It is only a burning invention that can make 
it transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the 
* “ Homiletics and Pastoral Theology,” by W. G. Shedd, D.D. 


226 


words; their use and abuse. 


harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances 
have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has 
been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will 
brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which 
the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest 
emotions of the heart are visible. 

How many human thoughts have baffled for generations 
every attempt to give them expression! How many opin¬ 
ions and conclusions are there, which form the basis of 
our daily reflections, the matter for the ordinary opera¬ 
tions of our minds, which were toiled after perhaps for 
ages, before they were seized and rendered comprehensible! 
How many ideas are there which we ourselves have 
grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere 
just above us, and found the arm of our intellect just 
too short to reach them; and then comes a happier genius, 
who, in a lucky moment, and from some vantage ground, 
arrests the meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating 
phantom, drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that 
which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters 
that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and, 
having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual posses¬ 
sion and heritage on mankind! 

The arrangement of words by great writers on the 
printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrange¬ 
ment of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see 
how a great general marshals his regiments, it is certainly 
not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of 
letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of 
thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway 
over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose 
words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,— 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


227 


almost crowding each other, so close are their files,— 
and all moving in irresistible array, without confusion 
or chasm, now holding some Thermopylae of new truth 
against some scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient 
Malakolf of error, but always with “ victory sitting eagle¬ 
winged on their crests.” A strain of music bursts on 
your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s daz¬ 
zling files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their 
gorgeous ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming 
to the wind,” “breathing united force and fixed thought,” 
come moving on “in perfect phalanx, to the Dorian 
mood of flutes and soft recorders.” Next comes Chilling- 
worth, with his glittering rapier, all rhetorical rule and 
flourish, according to the schools,— passado , montanso , 
staccato ,— one, two, three,— the third in your bosom. 
Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword, 
striking with the edge, while he pierces with the point, 
and stuns with the hilt, and wielding the ponderous 
weapon as easily as you would a flail. Next strides John¬ 
son with elephantine tread, with the club of logic in one 
hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right and left 
with antithetical blows, and, “ when his pistol misses fire, 
knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke, 
with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun; 
he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and ring¬ 
ing roar, missiles of every conceivable description,— chain 
shot, stone, iron darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes, 
and balls, that cut down everything before them. Close 
after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie,— carrying a 
tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other, 
— steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master 
of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “ playing it 


228 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims. 
There is Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once 
with a tremendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running 
under his opponent’s guard, and stabbing him to the 
heart with the heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic 
sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls with 
a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge 
fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with 
fancy and pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Dis¬ 
raeli, armed with an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while 
it kills; Emerson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade 
of transcendental temper, snatched from the scabbard of 
Plato; and Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who 
“gangs his ain gait,” armed with an antique stone axe, 
with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you would 
drugs with a pestle and mortar. 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS — (continued). 


“ To acquire a few tongues,” says a French writer, “ is the task of a 
few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of a life.” —Colton. 

When words are restrained by common usage to a particular sense, to run 
up to etymology, and construe them by a dictionary, is wretchedly ridicu¬ 
lous.— Jeremy Collier. 


Where do the words of Greece and Rome excel, 

That England may not please the ear as well ? 

What mighty magic’s in the place or air, 

That all perfection needs must centre there ? —Churchill. 



T is an interesting question connected with the subject 


of style, whether a knowledge of other languages is 
necessary to give an English writer a full command of his 
own. Among the arguments urged in behalf of the stud} 7- 
of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of the common¬ 
est is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of 
those tongues to one who would speak and write his own 
language effectively. The English language, we are 
reminded, is a composite one, of whose words thirty per 
cent are of Roman origin, and nearly five per cent of 
Greek; and is it not an immense help, we are asked, to 
a full and accurate knowledge of the meanings of the 
words we use, to know their entire history, including 
their origin? Is not the many-sided Goethe an authority 
on this subject, and does he not tell us that “ wer f remde 
sprache nicht kennt weiss nichts von seinen eigenen — 
“ He who is acquainted with no foreign tongues, knows 

nothing of his own”? Have we not the authority of one 

229 


230 


WOIIDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


of the earliest of English schoolmasters, Roger Ascham, 
for the opinion that, “ even as a hawke fleeth not hie 
with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency 
with one tongue”? 

In answering the general question in the negative, we 
do not mean to question the value or profound interest of 
philological studies, or to express any doubt concerning 
their utility as a means of mental discipline. The value 
of classical literature as an instrument of education has 
been decided by an overwhelming majority of persons of 
culture. We cannot, without prejudice to humanity, sepa¬ 
rate the present from the past. The nineteenth century 
strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws 
nutriment from them. Our whole literature is closely 
connected with that of the ancients, draws its inspiration 
from it, and can be understood only by constant reference 
to it. As a means of that encyclopedic culture, of that 
thorough intellectual equipment, which is-one of the most 
imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance 
with foreign, and especially with classic, literature, is abso¬ 
lutely indispensable; for the records of knowledge and of 
thought are many-tongued, and even if a great writer 
could have wreaked his thoughts upon expression in an¬ 
other language, it is certain that another mind can only in 
a few cases adequately translate them. It is only by the 
study of different languages and different literatures, 
ancient as well as modern, that we can escape that narrow¬ 
ness of thought, that Chinese cast of mind, which charac¬ 
terizes those persons who know no language but their own, 
and learn to distinguish what is essentially, universally, 
and eternally good and true from what is the result of 
accident, local opinion, or the fleeting circumstances of the 


THE SECRET OE APT WORDS. 


231 


time. It is useless to say that we know human nature 
thoroughly, if we know nothing of antiquity; and we can 
know antiquity only by study of the originals. Mitford, 
Grote, and Mommsen differ, and the reader who consults 
them with no knowledge of Greek or Latin is at the mercy 
of the last author he has perused. It has been frequently 
remarked that every school of thinkers has its mannerism 
and its mania, for which there is no cure but intercourse 
with those who are free from them. To study any class of 
writers exclusively is to bow slavishly to their authority, to 
accept their opinions, to make their tastes our tastes, and 
their prejudices our prejudices. Only by qualifying their 
ideas and sentiments with the thoughts and sentiments of 
writers in other ages, shall we be able to resist the intense 
pressure which is thus exercised upon our convictions and 
feelings, and avoid that mental slavery which is baser than 
the slavery of the body. 

The question, however, is not about the general educa¬ 
tional value of classical studies, but whether they are indis¬ 
pensable to him who would write or speak English with 
the highest force, elegance, and accuracy. I think they 
are not. In the first place, I deny that a knowledge of 
the etymologies of words,— of their meanings a hundred or 
five hundred years ago,— is essential to their proper use 
now. How am I aided in the use of the word “ villain ” 
by knowing that it once meant peasant, — in the use of 
“wince” by knowing that it meant kick,— in the use of 
“brat,” “beldam,” and “pedant,” by knowing that they 
meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and tutor,— in the use 
of “ meddle,” by knowing that formerly it had no offensive 
meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own 
affairs? Am I more or less likely to use “ringleader” 


232 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


correctly to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly 
spoken of by an old divine as “ the ringleader of our 
salvation”? Shall I be helped in the employment of the 
word “ musket ” by knowing that it was once the name of 
a small hawk, or fly, or in the use of the word “ tragedy ” 
by knowing that it is connected in some way with the 
Greek word for a goat? Facts like these are of deep 
interest to all, and of high value to the scholar; but how 
is the knowledge of them necessary that one may speak 
or write well? 

The question with the man who addresses his fellow- 
man by tongue or pen to-day, is not what ought to be, 
or formerly was, the meaning of a word, but, what is it 
now? Indeed, it may be doubted whether a reference to 
the roots and derivations,— the old original meanings of 
words,—which have grown obsolete by the fluctuations 
of manners, customs, and a thousand other causes, does 
not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to confusion, 
and prove rather a hindrance than a help to the correct 
use of our tongue. Words not only, for the most part, 
ride very slackly at anchor on their etymologies, borne, 
as they are, hither and thither by the shifting tides and 
currents of usage, but they often break away from their 
moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man’s antece¬ 
dents may help us sometimes to estimate his present self: 
but the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty 
centuries ago may only mislead us as to its meaning 
now. Spenser uses the word “ edify ” in the sense of 
“to build”; but would any one speak of a house being 
edified to-day? “Symbol” and “conjecture” are words 
that etymologically have precisely the same signification; 
and the same is true of “ hypostasis,” “ substance,” and 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


233 


“ understanding,” derived respectively from the Greek, 
Latin, and Saxon; yet have either the two former, or the 
three latter words, as they are now used, the least simi¬ 
larity of meaning? Is it desirable to call a suffering man 
a “ passionate ” man,— to say with Bishop Lowth that “ the 
Emperor Julian very ‘judiciously’ planned the overthrow 
of Christianity,”—to speak with Paley of the “judicious¬ 
ness” of God,— and with Guizot of the “duplicity” of cer¬ 
tain plays of Shakespeare (meaning their dual structure), 
—merely because we find these significations lying at the 
remote and dead roots of the words which we now employ 
in wholly different significations? The effect of a con¬ 
stant reference to etymology, in the use of words, is seen in 
the writings of Milton, whose use of “ elate ” for “ lifted 
on high,” “implicit” for “entangled,” “succinct” for 
“ girded,” “ spirited ” for “ inspired,” and hundreds of 
other such perversions of language, may please the scholar 
who loves to crack philological nuts, but is fitted only 
to perplex, confound, and mislead the ordinary reader. 
It is seen still more plainly in the writings of Donne, 
Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, who not only 
imported Latin words by wholesale into the language, 
only giving them an anglicized form and termination, 
but sometimes employed in a new sense words already 
adopted into English, and used in their original sense. 
Thus Taylor uses “immured” for “encompassed,” “irri¬ 
tation ” for “ making void ”; and in referring to “ the 
bruising of the serpent’s head,” he ludicrously speaks of 
the “‘ contrition’ of the serpent.” Again, he uses the word 
“ excellent ” for “ surpassing,” and even perverts the 
meaning of the word so far as to speak of “ an ‘ excellent’ 
pain! ” 


234 


words; their use and abuse. 


Will it be said that words become more vivid^and pic¬ 
turesque,— that we get a firmer and more vigorous grasp 
of their meaning,—when, as Coleridge advises, we present 
to our minds the visual images that form their primary 
meanings? The reply is, that long use deadens us to the 
susceptibility of such images, and in not one case in a 
thousand, probably, are they noticed. How many college 
graduates think of a “miser” as being etymologically a 
“miserable” man, of a “savage” as one living in “a 
wood,” or of a “desultory” reader as one who leaps from 
one study to another, as a circus rider leaps from horse 
to horse? A distinguished poet once confessed that the 
Latin imago first suggested itself to him as the root of 
the English word “ imagination ” when, after having been 
ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define 
this most important term in the critical vocabulary of 
his art. “We have had to notice over and over again” 
says Mr. Whitney in his late work on “The Life and 
Growth of Language,” “the readiness on the part of lan¬ 
guage-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous 
rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and 
concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie. 
This is one of the most fundamental and valuable ten¬ 
dencies in name-making; it constitutes an essential part 
of the practical availability of language.” 

If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him 
who would command all the resources of our tongue, how 
comes it that the most consummate mastery of the English 
language is exhibited by Shakespeare? Will it be said 
that his writings prove him to have been a classical 
scholar; that they abound in facts and allusions which 
imply an intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


235 


Greek and Roman literature? We answer that this is a 
palpable begging of the question. By the same reason¬ 
ing we can prove that scores of English authors, who, we 
know positively, never read a page of Latin or Greek, 
were, nevertheless, classical scholars. By similar logic we 
can prove that Shakespeare followed every calling in life. 
Lawyers vouch for his acquaintance with law; physicians 
for his skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge 
of the phenomena of mental disease; naturalists assert 
positively, from the internal evidence of his works, that 
he was a botanist and an entomologist; bishops, that he 
was a theologian; and claims have been put forth for his 
dexterity in cutting up sheep and bullocks. Ben Jonson 
tells us that he had “small Latin and less Greek”; 
another contemporary, that he had “ little Latin and no 
Greek.” “ Small Latin,” indeed, it must have been which 
a youth could have acquired in his position, who married 
and entered upon the duties of active life at eighteen. 
The fact that translations were abundant in the poet’s 
time, and that all the literature of that day was steeped 
in classicism, will fully account for Shakespeare’s knowl¬ 
edge of Greek and Roman historv, as well as for the clas- 
sical turns of expression which we find in his plays. 

But it may be said that Shakespeare, the oceanic, the 
many-souled, was phenomenal, and that no rule can be 
based on the miracles of a cometary genius who has had 
no peer in the ages. What shall we say, then, to Izaak 
Walton? Can purer, more idiomatic, or more attractive 
English be found within the covers of any book than 
that of “ The Complete Angler ”? Among all the contro¬ 
versialists of England, is there one whose words hit hard¬ 
er,— are more like cannon-balls,— than those of Cobbett? 


236 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


By universal concession he was master of the whole vocab¬ 
ulary of invective, and in narration his pen is pregnant 
with the freshness of green fields and woods; yet neither 
he, nor “honest Izaak,” ever dug up a Greek root, or 
unearthed a Latin derivation. Let any one compare a 
page of Cobbett with a page of Bentley, the great clas¬ 
sical critic, and he will find that the former writer excels 
the latter alike in clearness and precision of terms, in 
grammatical accuracy, and in the construction of his 
periods. Again, what shall we say of Keats, who could 
not read a line of Greek, yet who was the most thor¬ 
oughly classical of all English authors,— whose soul was 
so saturated with the Greek spirit, that Byron said “ he 
was a Greek himself”? Or what will the classicists do 
with Lord Erskine, confessedly the greatest forensic orator 
since Demosthenes? He learned but the elements of Latin, 
and in Greek went scarcely beyond the alphabet; but he 
devoted himself in youth with intense ardor to the study 
of Milton and Shakespeare, committing whole pages of the 
former to memory, and so familiarizing himself with the 
latter that he could almost, like Porson, have held con¬ 
versations on all subjects for days together in the phrases 
of the great English dramatist. It was here that he 
acquired that fine choice of words, that richness of thought 
and gorgeousness of expression, that beautiful rhythmus 
of his sentences, which charmed all who heard him. 

If one must learn English through the Greek and 
Latin, how shall we account for the admirable,— we had 
almost said, inimitable,— style of Franklin? Before he 
knew anything of foreign languages he had formed his 
style, and gained a wide command of words by the study 
of the best English models. Is the essayist, Edwin P. 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


237 


Whipple, a master of the English language? He was 
not, we believe, classically educated, yet few American 
authors have a greater command of all the resources of 
expression. His style varies in excellence,— sometimes, 
perhaps, lacks simplicity; but, as a rule, it is singularly 
copious, nervous, and suggestive, and clear as a pebbled 
rill. What is the secret of this command of our tongue? 
It is his familiarity with our English literature. His 
sleepless intellect has fed and fattened on the whole race 
of English authors, from Chaucer to Currer Bell. The 
profound, sagacious wisdom of Bacon, and the nimble, 
brilliant wit of Sydney Smith; the sublime mysticism of 
Sir Thomas Browne, and the rich, mellow, tranquil beauty 
of Taylor; Jonson’s learned sock and Hey wood’s ease; the 
gorgeous, organ-toned eloquence of Milton, and the close, 
bayonet-like logic of Chillingworth; the sweet-blooded wit 
of Fuller, and Butler’s rattling fire of fun; Spenser’s vo¬ 
luptuous beauty, and the lofty rhetoric, scorching wit, and 
crushing argument of South; Pope’s neatness, brilliancy, 
and epigrammatic point, and Dryden’s energy and ** full 
resounding line”; Byron’s sublime unrest and bursts of 
misanthropy, and Wordsworth’s deep sentiment and sweet 
humanities; Shelley’s wild imaginative melody, and Scott’s 
picturesque imagery and antiquarian lore; the polished 
witticisms of Sheridan, and the gorgeous periods of Burke, 
— with all these writers, and every other of greater or 
lesser note, even those in the hidden nooks and crannies 
of our literature, he has held converse, and drawn from 
them expressions for every exigency of his thought. 

To all these examples we may add one, if possible, still 
more convincing,— that of the late Hugh Miller, who, as 
Professor Marsh justly remarks, had few contemporaneous 


238 


words; their use and abuse. 


superiors as a clear, forcible, accurate, and eloquent writer, 
and who uses the most cumbrous Greek compounds as freely 
as monosyllabic English particles. His style is literally 
the despair of all other English scientific writers; yet it 
is positively certain that he was wholly ignorant of all 
languages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern 
provincial dialects. 

As to the oft-quoted saying of Goethe, to which the 
objector is so fond of referring, we may say with Professor 
Marsh, that, “ if by knowledge of a language is meant th^ 
power of expressing or conceiving the laws of a language 
in formal rules, the opinion may be well founded; but, if 
it refers to the capacity of understanding, and skill in 
properly using our own tongue, all observation shows it 
to be very wide of the truth.” Goethe himself, the same 
authority declares, was an indifferent linguist; he appar¬ 
ently knew little of the remoter etymological sources of 
his own tongue, or the special philologies of the cognate 
languages; and “it is difficult to trace any of the excel¬ 
lencies of his marvellously felicitous style to the direct 
imitation, or even the unconscious influence of foreign 
models.”* But he was a profound student of the great 
German writers of the sixteenth century; and hence his 
works are a test example in refutation of the theory that 
ascribes so exaggerated a value to classical studies. 

It is a remarkable fact, which throws a flood of light 
upon this subject, that the greatest masters of style in all 
the ages were the Greeks, who yet knew no word of any 
language but their own. In the most flourishing period 
of their literature, they had no grammatical system, nor 
did they ever make any but the most trivial researches 

* “Lectures on the English Language.” 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS. 


239 


in etymology. “ The wise and learned nations among the 
ancients,” says Locke, “ made it a part of education to cul¬ 
tivate their own, not foreign languages. The Greeks 
counted all other nations barbarous, and had a contempt 
for their languages. And though the Greek learning grew 
in credit among the Romans, . . . yet it was the Roman 
tongue that was made the study of their youth; their own 
language they were to make use of, and therefore it was 
their own language they were instructed and exercised in.” 
Demosthenes, the greatest master of the Greek language, 
and one of the mightiest masters of expression the world 
has seen, knew no other tongue than his own. He mod¬ 
elled his style after that of Thucydides, whose wonderful 
compactness, terseness, and strength of diction were de¬ 
rived from no study of old Pelasgic, Phoenician, Persian, 
or other primitive etymologies of the Attic speech,— of 
which he knew nothing,— but were the product of his 
own marvellous genius wreaking itself upon expression. 

No riches are without inconvenience. The men of 
many tongues almost inevitably lose their peculiar raciness 
of home-bred utterance, and their style, like their words, 
has a certain polyglot character. It has been observed by 
an acute Oxford professor that the Romans, in exact pro¬ 
portion to their study of Greek, paralyzed some of the 
finest powers of their own language. Schiller tells us 
that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible 
in foreign languages, because it was his business to write 
German , and he thought that, by reading other languages, 
he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to 
his own. Dryden attributed most of Cowley’s defects to 
his continental associations, and said that his losses at 
home overbalanced his gains from abroad. Thomas Moore, 


240 


words; their use and abuse. 


who was a fine classical scholar, tells us that the perfect 
purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language 
was justly attributed to their entire abstinence from 
every other. It is a saying as old as Cicero that women, 
being accustomed solely to their native tongue, usually 
speak and write it with a grace and purity surpassing 
those of men. “A man who thinks the knowledge of 
Latin essential to the purity of English diction,” says 
Macaulay, “ either has never conversed with an accom¬ 
plished woman, or does not deserve to have conversed 
with her. We are sure that all persons who are in the 
habit of hearing public speaking must have observed that 
the orators who are fondest of quoting Latin are by no 
means the most scrupulous about marring their native 
tongue. We could mention several members of Par¬ 
liament, who never fail to usher in their scraps of Horace 
and Juvenal with half-a-dozen false concords.” 

Mr. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” 
does not hesitate to express the opinion that “our great 
English scholars have corrupted the English language by 
jargon so uncouth that a plain man can hardly discern 
the real lack of ideas which their barbarous and mottled 
dialect strives to hide.” He then adds that the principal 
reason why well educated women write and converse in 
a purer style than well educated men, is “because they 
have not formed their taste according to those ancient 
classical standards, which, admirable as they are in them¬ 
selves, should never be introduced into a state of society 
unfitted for them.” To nearly the same effect is the 
declaration of that most acute judge of style, Thomas De 
Quincey, who says that if you would read our noble lan¬ 
guage in its native beauty, picturesque form, idiomatic 


THE SECRET OF APT WORDS* 


241 


propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy in 
its composition, you must steal the mail-bags, and break 
open the women’s letters. On the other hand, who has 
forgotten what havoc Bentley made when he laid his 
classic hand on “Paradise Lost”? What prose style, 
always excepting that of the “Areopagitica,” is worse for 
imitation than that of Milton, with its long, involved, 
half-rhythmical periods, “ dragging, like a wounded snake, 
their slow length along”? Yet Bentley and Milton, 
whose minds were imbued, saturated with Greek lit¬ 
erature through and through, were probably the pro- 
foundest classical scholars that England can boast. Let 
the student, then, who has a patriotic love for his native 
tongue, study it in its most idiomatic writers, and 
beware lest while he is wandering in fancy along the 
banks of the Me'ander, the Ilyssus, or the Tiber, or drink¬ 
ing at the fountains of Helicon, he heedlessly and pro¬ 
fanely trample under foot the beautiful, fragrant, and 
varied productions of his own land. 


CHAPTER X. 


ONOMATOPES. 


’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence; 

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.— Pope. 


Our blunted senses can no more realize the original delicacy of the appel¬ 
lative faculty, than they can attain to the keen perfection in which they still 
exist in the savage.— Lepsius. 


HATEVER opinion we have of the onomatopoeia 



’ ’ theory of the origin of language, so ably advocated 
by Farrar, Wedgwood, and Whitney, and so keenly ridi¬ 
culed by Max Muller and others, it is impossible to deny 
that there is a natural relationship between thought and 
articulate sound,—in other words that certain sounds are 
the natural expression of certain sensations, and of mental 
states that are analogous to those sensations. All lan¬ 
guages contain words which, in their very structure as 
composite sounds, more or less nearly resemble in quality, 
as soft or harsh, the sounds they designate. Such, in our 
language, are words representing animal sounds, as quack, 
cackle, roar, whinny, bellow, caw, croak, hiss, screech, etc.; 
words representing inarticulate human sounds, as laugh, 
cough, sob, shriek, whoop, etc.; sounds representing the 
collision of hard bodies, as clap, rap, tap, slap, etc.; sounds 
representing the collision of softer bodies, as dab, dub, 
thud, dub-a-dub; sounds representing motion through the 
air, as whizz, buzz, sough, etc.; sounds representing reso¬ 
nance, as clang, knell, ring, twang, etc.; and sounds rep- 


242 


ONOMATOPES. 


243 


resenting the motion of liquids, as clash, splash, dash, etc.* 
Even the various degrees of intensity in sound are ex¬ 
pressed by modifications of the vowels,— high notes being 
represented by low, broad sounds by «, and diminution by 
the change of a or o to i; while continuance is expressed 
by a reduplication of syllables, as in murmur, etc., and by 
the addition of r and Z, as in grab, grapple, wrest, wrestle, 
crack, crackle, dab, dabble. Animals are often named, 
upon the same principle, from their cries, birds especially, 
as we see in whip-poor-will, cuckoo, crow, quail, curlew, 
chough, owl, peewit, turtle, and many others. Again, we 
find that, independently of all confusion between a word 
and its associations, words having a harsh signification 
generally have a rough, harsh form, while words that 
denote something soft and pleasing, or sweet and tender, 
seem to breathe the very sensation they describe. The 
various passions of men naturally find expression in dif¬ 
ferent sounds. Anger, vehemence, gentleness, etc., have 
each a language, a style of utterance, peculiar to them¬ 
selves. Love and sorrow prompt smooth, melodious ex¬ 
pressions, while violent emotions express themselves in 
words that are hurried, abrupt and harsh. 

Were further proof wanting of this connection between 
external sounds and the processes of the mind, it is supplied 
in the strongest form by the fact that the different lan¬ 
guages of the earth are stamped with marks of predomi¬ 
nant local influences,— of the climate, scenery, and other 
physical conditions amid which they have been evolved. 
Rousseau, a century ago, called attention to the fact that 
the languages of the rich and prodigal South, being the 

♦This classification is from Farrar, who has abridged it from Wedgwood, 
in Phil. Trans. II., 118. 


244 


words; their use and abuse. 


daughters of passion, are poetic and musical, while those of 
the North, the daughters of necessity, bear a trace of their 
hard origin, and express by rude sounds rude sensations. 
Who does not discern in the “ soft and vowelled under¬ 
song” of the Italian the effect of a climate altogether 
different from that which has produced the stridulous, 
hirrient roughness of the German, the Dutch, and the 
Russian tongues ? What but different geographical posi¬ 
tions has made the language of the South-Sea Islanders so 
different from the dissonant clicks of the Hottentot, or the 
guttural polysyllables of the Cherokee? What other cause 
has made the language of the Tlascalans, the hardy and 
independent mountaineers dwelling in the high volcanic 
regions between Mexico and Vera Cruz, so much rougher 
than the polished Tezucan, or the popular dialect of the 
Aztecs, who are of the same family as the mountaineers ? 
It is because the vocal organs, which are formed with 
exceeding delicacy, are affected by the most trifling physical 
influences, that English is spoken in Devonshire, England, 
with a splutter, and in Suffolk with an attenuated whine; 
that the language spoken in the northern counties is 
harsher than that spoken in the southern; and that in the 
mountainous regions we find a harsher dialect than we 
hear in the plains. 

The manner in which words are formed by means of the 
imitations of natural sounds is illustrated by the word 
“ cock ” which is considered by etymologists to be an abbre¬ 
viated imitation of chanticleer’s “cock-a-doodle-doo!” 
From the name of the animal, which is thus derived from 
its cry, and then generalized and made fruitful in deriva¬ 
tives, come, by allusion to the bird’s pride and strut, the 
words “ coquette,” “ cockade,” the “ cock ” of a gun, to 


ONOMATOPES. 


245 


“ cock ” one’s eye, to “ cock ” the head on one side, a “ cocked ” 
hat, a “ cock ” of hay, a “ cock ’’-swain, a “ cock ’’-boat, the 
“ cock ” of a balance, and so on. It is in all probability by 
this method more than by any other, that words were 
produced in all the earlier stages of language, while the 
interjectional or exclamatory principle was, doubtless, next 
in importance. 

It is sometimes objected to the theory of the extensive 
use of onomatopoeia in the formation of language, that, 
were it true, we should find in the different languages of 
the earth a greater identity than actually exists in the 
terms expressive of physical facts. We should not find 
words so unlike as “ bang ” in English and pouf in French, 
employed to denote the sound of a gun; or ypolloq in 
Greek, quirquirra in the Basque, and sirsor in "Chinese, 
used as names for the grasshopper. Why, if the theory in 
question be true, do we find a clap of thunder called in 
Sanscrit vagragvala , in Gaelic tdirneanach, in Bohemian 
hromobitz, in Icelandic thruma ? Why does Coleridge sing 
of the nightingale’s “ murmurs musical and sweet jug- 
jug r,” while Tennyson says that “ Whit , whit , whit, in the 
bush beside me, chirrupt the nightingale ” ? 

The answer to this is, that man in naming things does 
not attempt to reproduce the identical sound which he 
hears, but artistically to reproduce it, or rather the impres¬ 
sion which it has made, just as a painter often deviates 
from the actual colors of nature, and paints a picture more 
or less ideal, to enhance the effect of his art. The imita¬ 
tion is not a dull, literal echo of the sound, but an echo of 
the impression produced by it on the human intelligence; 
not a mere spontaneous repercussion of the perception 
received, but a repercussion modified organically by the 


240 


words; their use and abuse. 


configurations of the mouth, and ideally by the nature of 
the analogy perceived between the sound and the object it 
expresses.* These repercussions, moreover, have been 
greatly blurred by the lapse of ages,— so much so, in many 
cases, as to be indistinguishable. Again, we must remem¬ 
ber that the impressions made by the same sounds on differ¬ 
ent minds, and even on the same mind in different moods, 
will greatly vary; and that in naming objects from other 
characteristics than the sound, different characteristics are 
chosen by different peoples. According to the mental con¬ 
stitution, the preponderance of reason or imagination, for 
example, in the name-giver, or particular experiences in 
connection with the object, the designating quality which 
is deemed most fit to furnish the name for it will vary. 
Thus it happens that in Sanscrit there is a great variety of 
names for the elephant, such as the “ hand-possessing ” 
animal, the “ toothed,” the “ two-tusked,” the “ great¬ 
toothed,” the “ pounder,” the “ roarer,” the “ forest-roarer,” 
the “ mailed,” the “ twice-drinking,” the “ mountain-born,” 
the “ vagabond,” and many others. Thus it happens that 
in Arabic there are five hundred names for the lion, two 
hundred for the serpent, and not less than a thousand for 
the sword. The nightingale is said to have twenty distinct 
articulations; and if this is true, we should expect that in 
the different languages of Europe it would have different 
names. The old poets all speak of the nightingale’s song 
as “most melancholy,” but in modern verse we read of 

“the merry nightingale 
That crowds and hurries and precipitates 
With fast thick warble its delicious notes.” 

So with thunder; the impression it makes upon hearers 


*“Chapters on Language” by Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S. 


ONOMATOPES. 


247 


varies with the varying qualities of their minds. To one 
man it is a dull rumble, to another a crackling explosion, 
and to a third a sudden flashing of light. As Archdeacon 
Farrar finely says: “What the eye sees and the ear hears 
depends in no small measure on the brain and the heart. 
The hieroglyphics of nature, like the inscriptions on the 
swords of Vathek, vary with every eye that glances on 
them; her voices, like the voice of Helen to the ambushed 
Greeks, take not one tone of their own, but the tone that 
each hearer loves best to hear,” * 

Though a large part of language has been formed in 
the way I have named, yet it must be admitted that few 
words, compared with the whole number, bear upon their 
face unmistakable traces of their origin. The explanation 
of this lies in the great changes which phonetic corruption 
effects in language. No sooner do men coin a word, than 
they instinctively and unconsciously seek to rid it of its 
superfluous letters, and in other ways to economize the 
time and labor expended upon its utterance; and if they 
are obliged to use a new or strange word, which conveys 
no intrinsic meaning to them, they try to give it a mean¬ 
ing by so changing it as to remove its arbitrary character. 
(See “Words of Illusive Etymology,” in Chapter on the 
“ Curiosities of Language.”) Thus words, in the course of 
ages, are rolled and rubbed out of shape, like the pebbles 
which are rubbed and rounded into smoothness by the sea 
waves on a shingly beach, until at last, though once plainly 
imitative, they lose all trace of their sensuous origin. 
Who, without knowledge of the intermediate diurnns and 
giorno, would for a moment suspect that jour could be 
derived from dies ; or would suppose, if he had not traced 


Chapters on Language,” p. 104. 


248 


words; their use and abuse. 


the etymology of “ musket,” that it is derived from the 
onomatope, musso , “I buzz”? But, notwithstanding all 
this, and though in the progress of scientific culture lan¬ 
guage becomes more and more abstract,— that is, words 
having no natural connection with the thoughts are used 
more and more arbitrarily to represent them, just as 
algebraic signs represent mathematical relations,— still 
language never loses wholly its original imitative char¬ 
acter. It will always, therefore, be a signal excellence 
of style when thought and emotion are represented by 
imitative expressions,— that is, by means of pictures or 
images of sensible things and events. The sound then 
points to the external object or event, or some sensible 
property or characteristic of it, and this, again, to the 
mental state or thought which it is taken to represent. 
It is for this reason that the poets, from Homer to 
Tennyson, abound in onomatopes,— in words and com¬ 
binations of words in which the sound is an echo to the 
sense. These words are not only the most vivid, the most 
passionate, and the most picturesque, bat they are the only 
ones which are instantly intelligible, and which possess an 
inherently graphic power. The power of poetry lies largely 
in the fact that, as Bunsen says, it “ reproduces the original 
process of the mind in which language originates. The 
coinage of words is the primitive poem of humanity, and 
the imagery of poetry and oratory is possible and effective 
only because it is a continuation of that primitive process 
which is itself a reproduction of creation.” 

Dyer, in his “ Ruins of Rome,” thus exemplifies, in a 
passage quoted with praise by Johnson, the beauty and 
force imparted to style by the adaptation of the sounds 
to the object described: 


ONOMATOPES. 


249 


“The pilgrim oft 

At dead of night, 'mid his oraison, hears 
Aghast the voice of time; disparting towers 
Tumbling all precipitate doivn dashed , 

Rattling around , loud thundering to the moon.'' 

Not only single words, but an entire sentence, or a 
series of sentences, may resemble the sound represented; 
as in the following description of the abode of Sleep, in 
Spenser: 

“And more to lull him in his slumbers soft, 

A trickling stream from high rocks tumbling downe, 

And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, 

Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sown© 

Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoone: 

No other noise, nor people’s troublous cries, 

As still are wont t’ annoy the walled towne, 

Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lies, 

Wrapped in eternal silence, far from enemies.” 

An intelligent writer reminds us that in reading this 
stanza, we ought to humor it with a corresponding tone of 
voice, lowering or deepening it, “as though we were going 
to bed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy night that had 
lulled us.” He suggests also that attention to the accent 
and pause in the last line will make us feel the depth 
and distance of the scene. Another illustration is fur¬ 
nished by the well known lines of Pope: 

“Soft is the stream when Zephyr gently blows, 

And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; 

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, 

The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. 

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw, 

The line too labors, and the words move slow; 

Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, 

Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.” 


More striking still, in some respects, is Christopher 
Pitt’s translation of the corresponding passage in Vida’s 
“Art of Poetry”: 


250 


words; their use axd abuse. 


“When things are small the terms should still be so, 
For low words please us, when the theme is low. 

But when some giant, horrible ancl g>im, 

Enormous in his gait , and vast in every limb, 

Comes towering on; the swelling words must rise 
In just proportion to the monster's size. 

If some large weight his huge arms strive to shove, 
The verse too labors; the thronged words scarce move. 
* * * * * 

But if the poem suffer from delay, 

Let the lines Jly precipitate away; 

And when the viper issues from the brake, 

Be quick; ivith stones and brands and fire attack 
His rising crest , and drive the serpent back." 


The overflowing of the fourth line in this passage, the 
abrupt termination of the middle of the next line, the 
pause at “Be quick!” and the rapidity of the last four 
lines, are exceedingly happy. The illustration of rapid 
motion is far superior to the last long and sprawling line 
of Pope, in which the preponderance of liquids and sibi¬ 
lants detains the voice too much, while it is further im¬ 
peded by the'word “unbending,— one of the most slug¬ 
gish, as Johnson truly says, in the language. 

How felicitous are “the hoarse Trinacrian shore 11 of 
Milton, and his description of the rapid motion and grating 
noise with which Hell’s gates are opened!— 

“Ou a sudden, open fly 
With impetuous recoil , and jarring sound , 

The infernal doors , and on their hinges grate 
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook 
Of Erebus.” 


What can be more expressive than this representation 
of the sounds of a battle in ancient times? — 


“ Arms on armor clashing bray’d 
Horrible discord; and the madding wheels 
Of brazen chariots raged.” 


ONOMATOPES. 


251 


How effective is the pause after the word “ shook ” in 
these lines!— 

“ And over them triumphant Death his dart 

Shook, but delayed to strike.” 

Discordant sounds are vividly described in this line 
from “Lycidas”: 

“Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.” 

Two of the most perfect examples of imitative har¬ 
mony in our literature are Wordsworth’s couplet, 

“ And see the children shouting on the shore, 

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore,” 

and Byron’s vivid description of a storm among the 
mountains: 

“ Far along 

From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, 

Leaps the live thunder!” 

The numerous adaptations of sound to sense in Dry- 
den's “ Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day ” are familiar to all. The 
following verse, from a song in his “ King Arthur,” is less 
hackneyed : 

“Come, if you dare, our trumpets sound; 

Come, if you dare, our foes rebound; 

We come , we come, we come , we come , 

Says the double, double , double beat of the thundering drum." 

No modern poet has made a more frequent or a more 
judicious use of onomatopoeia than Tennyson. “ The Bugle 
Song,” “ The Brook,” “ Tears, Idle Tears,” and “ Break, 
Break, Break,” will at once occur to the poet's admirers 
as masterpieces of representative art. The second stanza 
of the “ Bugle Song” has few equals in ancient or modern 
verse: 

‘ “O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, 

And thinner, clearer, farther going; 

O sweet and far, from cliff and scar, 

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!’ 

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, 

Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.” 


252 


words; their use and abuse. 


What can be more perfect of its kind than the picture 
of the shock of a melee , when the combatants 

“ Closed 

In conflict with the crash of shivering points, 

And thunder . . . 

And all the plain,—brand, mace, and shaft, and shield 
Shock'd, like an iron-clanging anvil banged 
With hammers;''' 

or the picture of a fleet of glass wrecked on a reef of 
gold, in the lines,— 

“For the fleet drew near, 

Touched , clinked , and clanked, and vanished.” 

Motion, as well as sound, has been happily imitated in 
language,— of which we have signal examples in the prog¬ 
ress of Milton’s fiend, whose wearisome journey is por¬ 
trayed by this artful arrangement of words: 

“ The fiend 

O’er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, 

With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, 

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies;” 

and in Pope’s translation of the noted passage in the 
“Odyssey” describing Sisyphus: 

“With many a step and many a groan, 

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone; 

The huge round stone, resulting with a bound , 

Thunders impetuous down , and smokes along the ground." 

In reading the second line, with its frequent recurrence 
of the aspirate, one seems to hear the giant pantings 
and groanings of Sisyphus; and a similar feeling is expe¬ 
rienced in reading the following line: 

“And when up ten steep slopes you’ve dragged your thighs.” 

Crowe, the now forgotten author of “ Lewisdon Hill,” 
fairly rivals Pope in the closing line of a version of the 
foregoing passage in the “Odyssey”: 

“A sudden force 

Turned the curst stone, and, slipping from his hold, 

Down again , down the steep rebounding , down it rolled .” 


ONOMATOPES. 


253 


An able literary critic,— the Rev. Robert A. Willmott,— 
has thus contrasted the majestic and easy verse of Dryden 
with the “ mellifluence ” of Pope. “ ‘ The mellifluence of 
Pope,’ as Johnson called it, has the defect of monotony. 
Exquisite in the sweet rising and falling of its clauses, it 
seldom or never takes the ear prisoner by a musical sur¬ 
prise. If Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he dis¬ 
plays none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the 
songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate, 
but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brill¬ 
iant, which pipes its one lay in a golden cage, and has 
forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement. 
But Dryden’s versification has the freedom and the fresh¬ 
ness of the fields. . . This is a great charm. He preserved 
the simple, unpremeditated graces of the earlier couplet, 
its confluence and monosyllabic close, while he added a 
dignity and a splendor unknown before. Pope’s modula¬ 
tion is of the ear; Dryden’s of the subject. He has a 
different tone for Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by 
the fountain side; for the startled knight, who listens to 
strange sounds within the glooms of the wood; and for 
the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a compliment.” 

In the following lines from “II Penseroso,” the effect 
combines both sound and motion: 

“Oft on a plat of rising ground. 

I hear the far-off curfew sound, 

Over some wide-watered shore, 

Svnnging slow with sullen roar." 

How admirably does the quick and joyous movement 
of the following lines from “ L’Allegro ” portray the 

thing described! — 

“Let the merry hells resound 
And the jocund rebecks sound. 

To many a youth, and many a maid, 

Dancing in the chequered shade.” 


254 


words; their use and abuse. 


Huge, unwieldy bulk, implying slowness of movement, 
has been happily expressed by Milton in the subjoined 
passages: 

“O’er all the dreary coasts 

So, stretched out, huge in length, the arch-fiend lay.’’ 

“But ended foul, in many a scaly fold 
Voluminous and vast. ' 

How inflated with bulky meaning are these lines from 
Shakespeare’s “ Troilus and Cressida”!— 

“The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling, 

From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause.” 

The greatest of the Greek and Roman poets have em¬ 
ployed those “echoes of nature,” the onomatopes, as freely 
as the modern. Every schoolboy is familiar with the words 
in which Virgil describes thunder,— “ Iterum atqne iterum 
fragor intonat ingens ,” as well as with those in which he 
represents the rapid clatter of horses’ hoofs: 

“ Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campurn ,” 
and the vivid words in which Homer recalls the snapping 
of a sword: 

Tpi\9i T€ Kal Terpa-xO l Si aTpv<)>ev. 

Who does not catch the hurtling of battle in the same 
poet’s 

< TKenrer h'iardiv re pol^op nai Sou nov o.k6vt<ov, 

and a murmur of ocean in 

a/caAappeirao fiaOvppoov Oxeavoio? 

A similar effect is produced by his 

7roAv<f>AoiVj3oio 9a\d<rar)<;, 

the first word of which was perhaps intended to represent 
the roaring of the wave as it mounts on the sea-shore, 
and the second the hissing sound of a receding billow. 

Virgil’s description of the Cyclopses toiling at the anvil; 
his picture of the Trojans laboriously hewing the founda- 


ONOMATOPES. 


255 


tions of a tower on the top of Priam’s palace, and its sud¬ 
den and violent fall; Ennius’s imitation of a trumpet 
blast; and the imitation by Aristophanes of the croaking 
of frogs,— will recur to the classic reader as other exam¬ 
ples of the felicitous use of this figure by the Greek and 
Roman writers. 

Paronomasia and alliteration owe their subtle beauty to 
the fact that in using them the writer has reference to 
words considered as sounds. Though an excess of either 
is offensive, yet, charily used, it adds a surprising force to 
expression. How much is the grandeur of the effect en¬ 
hanced by the repetition of the s in the following lines 
from Macbeth!— 

“ That shall, to all our days and nights to come, 

Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.‘” 

Dr. Johnson, in speaking of imitative harmony, ob¬ 
serves that the desire of discovering frequent adaptations 
of the sound to the sense “ has produced many wild con¬ 
ceits and imaginary beauties.” This is only saying that 
the poet, like the painter, may exaggerate the importance 
of his accessories, while he gives too little heed to his 
main theme. But this is no argument against the legiti¬ 
mate use of any subtle or peculiar beauty in either the 
pictorial or the metrical art. There are many cases where 
it is impossible to use language which is specific, vivid, 
and appropriate, without employing imitative words. For 
the choice of these words no rules can be given; only an 
instinctive and exquisite taste can enable one to decide 
when they may be consciously used, and when they should 
be shunned. But he who can use onomatopoeia with 
skill and judgment,— who can call into play, on proper 
occasions, that swift and subtle law of association whereby 


256 


words; their use and abuse. 


a reproduction of the sounds at once recalls to the mind 
the images or circumstances with which they are con¬ 
nected,— has mastered one of the greatest secrets of the 
writer’s art. It was a saying of Shenstone, which experi¬ 
ence confirms, that harmony and melody of style have 
greater weight than is generally imagined in our judg¬ 
ments upon writing and writers; and, as a proof of this, 
he says that the lines of poetry, the periods of prose, and 
even the texts of Scripture we most frequently recollect 
and quote, are those which are preeminently musical. 
The following magical lines, which owe their interest to 
the cadence hardly less than to their imagery, illustrate 
Shenstone’s remark: 

Youth and Age. 

“Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; 

Friendship is a sheltering tree; 

Oh, the joys that came down shower-like, 

Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, 

Ere I was old! 

Ere I was old! Ah, woful Ere! 

Which tells me, Youth’s no longer here 1 
O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 

’Tis known that thou and I were one; 

I’ll think it but a fond conceit — 

It cannot be that Thou art gone! 

The vesper bell hath not yet tolled, 

And thou wert aye a masker bold! 

What strange disguise hast now put on. 

To make believe that thou art gone? 

I see these locks in silvery slips, 

This drooping gait, this altered size: 

But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, 

And tears take sunshine from thine eyes. 

Life is but thought; so think I will, 

That Youth and I are house-mates still.” 


CHAPTER XI. 


THE FALLACIES IN’ WORDS. 


Gardons-nous de l’equivoque!— Paul Louis Courier. 

Words are grown so false, I am loathe to prove reason with them.— 
Shakespeare, 

The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is 
the mother of all error.— Hooker. 


One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt; 

One trivial letter ruins all, left out; 

A knot can choke a felon into clay; 

A knot will save him, spelt without the k; 

The smallest word has some unguarded spot, 

And danger lurks in i without a dot.—O. W. Holmes. 



N some of the great American rivers, where lumber- 


ing operations are carried on, the logs, in floating 
down, often get jammed up here and there, and it becomes 
necessary to find the timber which is a kind of keystone 
and stops all the rest. Once detach this, and away dash 
the giant trunks, thundering headlong, helter-skelter, down 
the rapids. It is just this office which he who defines his 
terms accurately performs for the dead-locked questions 
of the day. Half the controversies of the world are dis¬ 
putes about tvords. How often do we see two persons 
engage in what Cowper calls “ a duel in the form of a 
debate,”—tilting furiously at each other for hours,— 
slashing with syllogisms, stabbing with enthymemes, hook¬ 
ing with dilemmas, and riddling with sorites,— with no 
apparent prospect of ever ending the fray, till suddenly 
it occurs to one of them to define precisely what he means 


257 


258 


words; their use and abuse. 


by a term on which the discussion hinges; when it is found 
that the combatants had no cause for quarrel, having 
agreed in opinion from the beginning! The juggle of all 
sophistry lies in employing equivocal expressions,— that 
is, such as may be taken in two different meanings, using 
a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense 
in the conclusion. Frequently the word on which a con¬ 
troversy turns is unconsciously made to do double duty, 
and under a seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of 
meaning, from which endless confusions arise. Accurately 
to define such a term is to provide one’s self with a master- 
key which unlocks the whole dispute. 

Who is not familiar with the fierce contests of the 
Nominalists and Realists, which raged so long in the Mid¬ 
dle Ages? Though turning upon refinements of abstrac¬ 
tion so subtle that one would think they never could stir 
in the human bosom the faintest breath of passion, the 
dispute roused the combatants on both sides to the most 
frenzied fury. Beginning with words, these two meta¬ 
physical sects came at last to blows, and not only shed 
blood, but even sacrificed lives for the question, whether 
an abstract name (as man, for example) represented any 
one man in particular, or man in general. Yet, properly 
understood, they maintained only opposite poles of the 
same truth; and were, therefore, both right, and both 
wrong. The Nominalists, it has been said, only denied 
what no one in his senses would affirm, and the Realists 
only contended for what no one in his senses would deny; 
a hair’s breadth parted those who, had they understood 
each other’s language, would have had no altercation. 
Again, who can tell how far the clash of opinions among 
political economists has been owing to the use in opposite 


THE FALLACIES IFT WORDS. 


259 


senses of a very few words? Had Smith, Say, Ricardo, 
Malthus, M’Culloch, Mill, begun framing their systems by 
defining carefully the meanings attached by them to cer¬ 
tain terms used on every page of their writings,— such 
as Wealth, Labor, Capital, Value,. Supply and Demand, 
Over-trading,— it may be doubted whether they would 
not, to some extent, have harmonized in opinion, instead 
of giving us theories as opposite as the poles. 

How many fallacies have grown out of the ambiguity 
of the word “ money,” which, instead of being a simple 
and indivisible term, has at least half-a-dozen different 
meanings! Money may be either specie, bank-notes, or 
both together, or credit, or capital, or capital offered for 
loan. A merchant is said to fail “for lack of money,” 
when, in fact, he fails because he lacks credit, capital, or 
merchandise, money having no more to do with the mat¬ 
ter than the carts or railway wagons by which the mer¬ 
chandise is transported. Again: money is spoken of as 
yielding “interest,” which it cannot do, since wherever it 
is, whether in a bank, in one’s pocket, or in a safe, it is 
dead capital. The confusion of the terms “wealth” and 
“money” gave birth to “the mercantile system,” one of 
the greatest curses that ever befell Europe. As in popular 
language to grow rich is to accumulate “ money,” and to 
grow poor is to lose “ money,” this term became a synonym 
for “wealth”; and, till recently at least, all the nations 
of Europe studied every means of accumulating gold and 
silver in their respective countries. To accomplish this 
they prohibited the exportation of money, gave bounties 
on the importation, and restricted the importation of 
other commodities, expecting thus to produce a “ favor¬ 
able balance of trade,”—a conduct as wise as that of a 


260 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


shop-keeper who should sell his goods only for money, and 
hoard every dollar, instead of replacing and increasing his 
stock, or putting his surplus capital at interest. France, 
under Colbert, acted upon this principle, and Voltaire 
extolled his wisdom in thus preferring the accumulation 
of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for articles 
which must, sooner or later, wear out . The effect of this 
fallacy has been to make the nations regard the wealth 
of their customers as a source of loss instead of profit, 
and an advantageous market as a curse instead of a bless¬ 
ing, by which errors the improvement of Europe has been 
more retarded than by all other causes put together. 

So with the mortal theological wars in which so much 
ink has been shed. Who has not read of the disputes 
between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies, 
when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single 
expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed 
to make a man a heretic,— when every heresy produced a 
new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves 
of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge 
folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants 
of divinity, which never would have been published but 
for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the 
meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. 
Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the 
words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,— terms vital in 
theology,— the more they argued, the farther they were 
apart, and while fancying they were battling with real 
adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or 
fighting with shadows, till at last utter 

“Confusion umpire sat, 

And by deciding worse embroiled the fray.” 


THE FALLACIES IN' WORDS. 


261 


The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied 
the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon 
nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the 
disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical 
Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of 
the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce 
wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansen- 
ists, touching the doctrine of “ efficacious ” and “ sufficient ” 
grace. The question was, “ Whether all men received 
from God sufficient grace for their conversion.” The 
Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted 
that this sufficient grace would never be efficacious , unless 
accompanied by special grace. “ Then the sufficient grace, 
which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms,” cried 
the Jesuits; “and, besides, it is a heresy!” We need not 
trace the history of the logomachy that followed, which 
Pascal has immortalized in his “Provincial Letters,”— 
letters which De Maistre denounces as “ Les Menteurs,” 
but which the Jesuits found to be both “sufficient” and 
“efficacious” for their utter discomfiture. The theo¬ 
logical student will recall the microscopic distinctions; 
the fine-spun attenuations; the spider-like threads of 
meaning; the delicate, infinitesimal verbal shavings of 
the grave and angelic doctors; how one subtle disputant, 
with syllabical penetration, would discover a heresy in 
his opponent’s monosyllables, while the other would detect 
a schism in his antagonist’s conjunctions, till finally, after 
having filled volumes enough with the controversy to 
form a library, the microscopic point at issue, which had 
long been invisible, was whittled down to nothing. 

A controversy not less memorable was that which raged 
in the church in the third and fourth centuries between 


262 


words; their use and abuse. 


the “ Homoousians” and the “ Homoiusians ” concerning 
the nature of Christ. The former maintained that Christ 
was of the same essence with the Father; the latter that 
he was of like essence,— a dispute which Boiieau has 
satirized in these witty lines: 

“D’une syllabe impie un saint mot augmente 
Remplit tous les esprits d’aigreurs si meurtrieres— 

Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue, 

Perir tant de Chretiens, martyrs d'une diphthongue!" 

The determination of the controversy depended on the 
retention or rejection of the diphthong or , or rather upon 
the change of the letter o into i; and hence it has been 
asserted that for centuries Christians fought like tigers, 
and tore each other to pieces, on account of a single letter. 
It must be admitted, however, that the dispute, though it 
related to a mystery above human comprehension, was 
something more than a verbal one; and though it is easy 
to ridicule “ microscopic theology,” yet it is evident that 
if error employs it, truth must do the same, even if the 
distinction be as .small as the difference between two 
animalcules fighting each other among a billion of fellows 
in a drop of water. 

Another famous theological controversy was that con¬ 
cerning the doctrine of the Double Procession, which, 
though mainly a verbal dispute, tore asunder the Eastern 
and Western Churches, gave the chief occasion for the 
anathemas of the Athanasian creed, precipitated the fall of 
the Empire of Constantinople, and, it has been asserted, 
sowed the original seed of the present perplexing Eastern 
Question. 

To how many discussions has that ambiguous phrase, 
“the Church,” given rise! It has been shown that in all 


THE FALLACIES IH WORDS. 


263 


countries where there is a religious establishment sup¬ 
ported by law, this phrase may have six different meanings. 
A Romanist understands by “ the Church ” his own com¬ 
munion, with the hierarchy and papal head; a Protestant 
includes within “the Church” all sincere and devout 
Christians of every denomination. A Romanist, again, 
understands “priest” to refer to a sacrificial priesthood; a 
Presbyterian regards it as derived from “ presbyter,” and 
to mean simply “ elder.” 

Disraeli remarks, in his “ Curiosities of Literature,” that 
there have been few councils or synods where the addition 
or omission of a word or a phrase might not have termi¬ 
nated an interminable logomachy. “ At the Council of 
Basle, for the convenience of the disputants, John de 
Secubia drew up a treatise of undeclined words, chiefly to 
determine the significations of the particles from, by, but, 
and except, which, it seems, were perpetually occasioning 
fresh disputes among the Hussites and Bohemians. . . In 
modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the 
church from the ‘ confusion of words.’ His holiness on one 
occasion, standing in equal terror of the Court of France, 
who protected the Jesuits, and of the Court of Spain, who 
maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a phrase, 
where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or 
the end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions 
which he condemned; and when the rival parties dis¬ 
patched deputations to the Court of Rome to plead for the 
period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this ‘confu¬ 
sion of words,’ flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties; 
nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the 
rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that 
of the other close by a full period! ” 


264 


words: their use and abuse. 


It has been truly said by a Scotch divine that the vehe¬ 
mence of theological controversy has been generally pro¬ 
portional to the emptiness of the party phrases used. It is 
probable that in nine cases out of ten accurate definitions 
of the chief terms in dispute would have made the most 
celebrated controversies impossible. It is stated by the 
biographer of Dr. Chalmers that that eminent divine and 
Dr. Stuart met one day in Edinburgh, and engaged in a 
long and eager conversation on saving grace. Street after 
street was paced, and argument after argument was vigor¬ 
ously plied. At last, his time or his patience exhausted, 
Chalmers broke off the interview; but, as at parting he 
shook his opponent by the hand, he said: “If you wish to 
see my views stated clearly and distinctly, read a tract 
called ‘ Hindrances to Believing the Gospel.’ ” “ Why,” ex¬ 
claimed Stuart, “ that’s the very tract I published myself ! ” 
As in theology, so in philosophy, words used without 
precision have been at the bottom of nearly all controver¬ 
sies. How often such terms as Nature, Necessity, Freedom, 
Law, Body, Matter, Substance, Revelation, Inspiration, 
Knowledge, Belief, Finite, and Infinite, are tossed about in 
the wars of words, as if everybody knew their meaning, 
and as if all the disputants used them in exactly the same 
sense! Max Muller sensibly observes that people will fight 
and call each other very hard names for denying or assert¬ 
ing certain opinions about the Supernatural, who would 
consider it impertinent if they were asked to define what 
they mean by the Supernatural, and who have never even 
clearly perceived the meaning of Nature. The same writer 
shows that the words “ to know ” and “ to believe,” the 
meanings of which seem so obvious, are each used, in 
modern languages, in three distinct senses. When we 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


265 


speak of our belief in God, or in the immortality of the 
soul, we want to express a certainty independent of sense, 
evidence and reason, yet more convincing than either. But 
when we say that we believe Our Lord suffered under Pon¬ 
tius Pilate, or lived during the reign of Augustus, we do 
not mean to say that we believe this with the same belief 
as the existence of God, or the immortality of the soul. 
Our assent, in this case, is based on historical evidence, 
which is only a subdivision of sense evidence, supplemented 
by the evidence of reason. When, thirdly, we say, “ I be¬ 
lieve it is going to rain,” “ I believe ” means no more than 
“ I guess.” The same word, therefore, “ conveys the high¬ 
est as well as the lowest degree of certainty that can be 
predicated of the various experiences of the human mind, 
and the confusion produced by its promiscuous employment 
has caused some of the most violent controversies in mat¬ 
ters of religion and philosophy.” * 

The art of treaty-making appears once to have con¬ 
sisted in a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand; and the most 
dexterous diplomatist was he who had always “ an arrih'e 
pensJe, which might fasten or loosen the ambiguous ex¬ 
pression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in the 
mosaic of treachery.” When the American colonies re¬ 
fused to be taxed by Great Britain, on the ground that 
they were not represented in the House of Commons, a 
new term, “virtual representation,” was invented to silence 
their clamors. The sophism was an ingenious one; but it 
cost the mother country a hundred millions sterling, forty 
thousand lives, and the most valuable of her colonial 
possessions. 

Hume’s famous argument against miracles is based 

* “ Lectures on the Science of Language,” Second Series, pp. 592-6. 


266 


words; their use and abuse. 


entirely upon a petitio principii , or begging of the ques¬ 
tion, artfully concealed in an ambiguous use of the word 
“ experience.” In all our experience, he argues, we have 
never known the laws of nature to be violated; on the 
other hand, we have had experience, again and again, of 
the falsity of testimony; consequently we ought to believe 
that any amount of testimony is false rather than admit 
the occurrence of a miracle. But whose experience does 
Hume mean? Does he mean the experience of all 
the men that ever lived? If so, he palpably begs the 
very question in dispute. Does he mean that a miracle 
is contrary to the experience of each individual who has 
never seen one? This would lead to the absurdest con¬ 
sequences. Not only was the King of Bantam justified 
in listening to no evidence for the existence of ice, but no 
man would be authorized, on this principle, to expect his 
own death. His experience informs him directly, only that 
others have died; and, as he has invariably recovered when 
attacked by disease himself, why, judging by his experi¬ 
ence, should he expect any future sickness to be mortal ? 
If, again, Hume means only that a miracle is contrary to 
the experience of men generally , as to what is common and 
of ordinary occurrence, the maxim will only amount to this, 
that false testimony is a thing of common occurrence, and 
that miracles are not. This is true enough; but “too 
general to authorize of itself a conclusion in any particular 
case. In any other individual question as to the admissi¬ 
bility of evidence, it would be reckoned absurd to consider 
merely the average chances for the truth of testimony in 
the abstract, without inquiring what the testimony is, in 
the particular instance before us. As if, e.g ., any one 
had maintained that no testimony could establish Colum- 


THE FALLACIES IH WORDS. 


267 


bus’s account of the discovery of America, because it is 
more common for travellers to lie than for new continents 
to be discovered.” * 

Again, the terms “ experience ” and “ contrary to expe¬ 
rience,” imply a contradiction fatal to the whole argument. 
It is clear that a revelation cannot be founded, as regards 
the external proof of its reality, upon anything else than 
miracles; and these events must be, in a sense, contrary to 
nature, as known to us , by the very definition of the word. 
If they entered into the ordinary operations of nature,— 
that is, were subjects of experience,— they would no longer 
be miracles. 

In the very phrase “ a violation of nature,” so cun¬ 
ningly used by sceptics, there lurks a sophism. The 
expression seems to imply that there are effects that have 
no cause; or, at least, effects whose cause is foreign to the 
universe. But if miracles disturb or interrupt the estab¬ 
lished order of things, they do so only in the same way 
that the will of man continually breaks in upon the order 
of nature. There is not a day, an hour, or a minute, in 
which man, in his contact with the material world, does 
not divert its course, or give a new direction to its order. 
The order of nature allows an apple-tree to produce fruit; 
but man can girdle the tree, and prevent it from bearing 
apples. The order of nature allows a bird to wing its 
flight from tree to tree; but the sportsman’s rifle brings 
the bird to the dust. Yet, in spite of this, it is asserted 
that the smallest conceivable intervention, disturbing the 
fated order of nature, linked as are its parts indissolubly 
from eternity in one chain, must break up the entire sys¬ 
tem of the universe! “If only the free will of man be 


Whately’s Logic. 


268 


words; their use and abuse. 


acknowledged, then” as an able writer says, “this entire 
sophism comes down in worthless fragments. So long as 
we allow ourselves to speak as theists , then miracles which 
we attribute to the will , the purpose, the power of God, 
are not in any sense violations of nature; or they are so 
in the same sense in which the entireness of our human 
existence,— our active converse with the material world 
from morning to night of every day,— is also a violation 
of nature.” The truth is, however, that miracles are not 
properly violations of the laws of nature, but suspensions 
of them, or rather intercalations of higher and immedi¬ 
ate operations of God’s power, in place of the ordinary 
development of those laws. An eminent scientist finds a 
rough illustration of this in the famous Strasburg clock. 
He stood one day, and watched it steadily marking the 
seconds, minutes, hours, days of the week, and phases of 
the moon, when suddenly 1 the figure of an angel turned 
up his hour-glass, another struck four times, and Death 
struck twelve times with metal marrow-bones to indicate 
noon; various figures passed in and out of the doorways; 
the twelve Apostles marched, one by one, before the figure 
of their Master, and a brass cock three times flapped its 
wings, threw back its head, and crowed. “ All this,” says 
the scientist, “was as much a part of the designer’s plan 
as the ordinary marking of time, and he had provided 
for it in advance, and the machinery for its execution was 
so arranged as to come into play at a definite moment. So 
God may have prepared the universe from the beginning 
with a view to miracles, may have ordered its laws in such 
a manner that at the predetermined hour in His providence 
these wonderful phenomena should appear, and bear con¬ 
vincing testimony to His own power and greatness.” 


FALLACIES IK WORDS. 


269 


A further and not less fatal objection to Hume’s argu¬ 
ment is that it confounds the distinction between testimony 
and authority, between the veracity of a witness and his 
competency. The miraculous character of an event is not 
a matter of intuition or observation, but of inference, and 
cannot be decided by testimony, but only by reasoning from 
the probabilities of the case. The testimony relates only 
to the happening of the event ; the question concerning the 
nature of this event, whether it is, or is not, a violation of 
physical law, can only be determined by the judgment, 
after weighing all the circumstances of the case. No event 
whatever, viewed simply as an event, as an external phe¬ 
nomenon, can be so marvellous that sufficient testimony 
will not convince us that it has really occurred. A thou¬ 
sand years ago the conversion of five loaves of bread into as 
many hundred, or the raising of a dead man to life, would 
not have appeared more incredible than the transmission of 
a written message five thousand miles, without error, 
within a minute of time, or from Europe to America, under 
the waters of the Atlantic; yet these feats, miraculous as 
they would once have seemed, have been accomplished by 
the electric telegraph. Hume’s argument against miracles, 
therefore, which is based entirely upon an appeal to experi¬ 
ence and testimony, without reference to the competency of 
the conclusion that the events testified to were supernat¬ 
ural, is altogether inapplicable, 

Hume’s argument reminds us of the fallacies that lurk 
in the word “Nature,” and the phrase “Law of Nature.” 
Etymologically, “ Nature ” means she who gives birth, or who 
brings forth. But what is she ? Is she an independent 
power, a being endowed with intelligence and will? Or is it 
not evidently a mere figure of speech, when we personify 


270 


words; their use and abuse. 


Nature, and speak of her works and her laws? “ It is easy,” 
says Cuvier, “ to see the puerility of those philosophers 
who have conferred on Nature a kind of individual exist¬ 
ence, distinct from the Creator, from the laws which He has 
imposed on the movement, and from the properties and 
forms which He has given to His creatures; and who rep¬ 
resent Nature as acting on matter by means of her own 
power and reason.” Again, the phrase “Law of Nature” 
is sometimes used as if it were equivalent to efficient cause. 
There are persons who attempt to account for the phenom¬ 
ena of the universe by the mere agency of physical laws, 
when there is no such agency, except as a figure of speech. 
A “Law of Nature” is only a general statement concern¬ 
ing a lame number of similar individual facts, which it 
describes, but in no way accounts for, or explains. It is not 
the Law of Gravitation which causes a stone thrown into 
the air to fall to the earth; but the fact that the stone so 
falls is classed with many other facts, which are compre¬ 
hended under the general statement called the “ Law of 
Gravitation.” “ Second causes,” as physical laws are some¬ 
times called, “ are no causes at all; they are mere fictions 
of the intellect, and exist only in thought. A cause , 
in the proper sense of the word, that is, an efficient cause, 
as original and direct in its action, must be a first cause; 
that through which its action is transmitted is not a cause, 
but a portion of the effect ,— as it does not act, but is acted 
upon.” * 

The changes of meaning -which words undergo in the 
lapse of time, and the different senses in which the same 
word is used in different countries, are a fruitful source of 
misunderstanding and error. Hence in reading an old 
♦Bowen’s “Logic,” p. 432. 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


271 


author it is necessary to be constantly on our guard lest 
our interpretations of his words*, involve a gross anachron¬ 
ism, because his “pure ideas” have become our “mixed 
modes.” The titles of “tyrant,” “sophist,” “parasite,” 
were originally honorable distinctions; and to attach to 
them their modern significations would give us wholly false 
ideas of ancient history. When Bishop Watson, in defend¬ 
ing Christianity and the Bible from the attacks of Gibbon 
and Thomas Paine, entitled his books “ An Apology for 
Christianity,” and “ An Apology for the Bible,” he used the 
word “ apology ” in its primitive sense of “ a defence,” as 
Plato had used it in his “ Apologia Socratis,” and Quad- 
ratus in his “ Apology for Christianity ” to the Emperor 
Adrian; but the author was probably understood by many 
of his readers to be offering an excuse for the Christian sys¬ 
tem and for the faults of the Scriptures, instead of a vindi¬ 
cation of their truth. “ Apology for the Bible! ” exclaimed 
George the Third, on hearing of the book; “the Bible 
needs no apology.” When we find an old English writer 
characterizing his opponent’s argument as “impertinent,” 
we are apt to attach to the word the idea of insolence or 
rudeness; whereas the meaning is simply “ not pertinent” to 
the question. So a magistrate who “ ‘ indifferently ’ admin¬ 
istered justice” meant formerly a magistrate who admin¬ 
istered justice “ impartially.” 

Were we to use the word “ gravitation ” in translating 
certain passages of ancient authors, we should assert that 
the great discovery of Newton had been anticipated by hun¬ 
dreds of years, though we know that these authors had 
never dreamed of the law which that word recalls to our 
minds. Most of the terminology of the Christian church 
is made up of words that once had a more general mean- 


272 


words; their use and abuse. 


ing. “Bishop” meant originally, overseer; “priest,” or 
“presbyter,” meant elder; “deacon” meant adminis¬ 
trator; and “sacrament,” a vow of allegiance. In read¬ 
ing the passage in the Athanasian Creed where the per¬ 
sons of the Trinity are spoken of as the Father “ incom¬ 
prehensible,” the Son “ incomprehensible,” and the Holy 
Ghost “ incomprehensible,” almost all persons suppose the 
word “ incomprehensible ” to mean “ inconceivable,” or 
beyond or above the human understanding. But when 
the Creed was translated into English from the Latin, 
the word meant simply “ not comprehended within any 
limits,” and corresponded to the term “ immense,” used in 
the original. In studying the Greek and Latin classics, 
we shall be continually led into error, unless we note the 
difference between the meanings attached in them to cer¬ 
tain terms, and those we now attach to corresponding 
terms. Thus the “ God ” denoted by the Greek and 
Latin words which we so translate, was not the eternal 
Maker and Governor of the Universe, whom Christians 
worship, but a being such as our Pagan forefathers wor¬ 
shipped. In reading the history of France, an American 
or Englishman is constantly in danger of misapprehension 
by associating with certain words common to the French 
and English languages similar ideas. When he reads of 
Parliaments or the Noblesse , he is apt to suppose that they 
resembled the Parliaments and Nobility of England, when 
their constitution was altogether different. To confound 
them is like confounding a Jacobin and a Jacobite, a 
French vicaire with an English vicar, or a French gouver- 
nante with an English governess. The list is almost end¬ 
less of words, which, derived from the same Latin term, 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


273 


connote one class of ideas in French and another in 
English. 

Mr. J. S. Mill observes that historians, travellers, and 
all who write or speak concerning moral and social phe¬ 
nomena with which they are unacquainted, are apt to con¬ 
found in their descriptions things wholly diverse. Having 
but a scanty vocabulary of words relating to such phenom¬ 
ena, and never having analyzed the facts to which these 
words correspond in their own country, they apply them 
to other facts to which they are more or less inapplicable. 
Thus, as I have before briefly stated, the first English 
conquerors of Bengal carried with them the phrase 
“ landed proprietor ” into a country where the rights 
of individuals over the soil were extremely different in 
degree, and even in nature, from those recognized in Eng¬ 
land. Applying the term with all its English associations 
in such a state of things, to one who had only a limited 
right they gave an absolute right; from another, because 
he had not an absolute right, they took away all right; 
drove whole classes of men to ruin and despair; filled 
the country with banditti; created a feeling that nothing 
was secure; and produced, with the best intentions, a dis¬ 
organization which had not been produced in that country 
by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders.* 

How often, in reading ancient history, are we misled 
by the application of modern terms to past institutions 
and events! Guizot, in speaking of the towns of Europe 
between the fifth and tenth centuries, cautions his readers 
against concluding that their state was one either of posi¬ 
tive servitude or of positive freedom. He observes that 
when a society and its language have lasted a considerable 


* 11 Logic,” Book IV., Chap. 5. 


274 


words; their use and abuse. 


time, its words acquire a complete,, determinate, and pre¬ 
cise meaning,— a kind of legal official signification. Time 
has introduced into the signification of every term a thou¬ 
sand ideas, which are suggested to us every time we hear 
it pronounced, but which, as they do not all bear the same 
date, are not all suitable at the same time. Thus the 
terms “ servitude ” and “ freedom ” recall to our minds 
ideas far more precise and definite than the facts of the 
eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries, to which they relate. 
Whether we say that the towns in the eighth century were 
in a state of “ freedom ” or in a state of “ servitude,” we 
say, in either case, too much; for they were a prey to the 
rapacity of the strong, and yet maintained a certain degree 
of independence and importance. 

So, again, as the same writer shows, the term “ civiliza¬ 
tion ” comprises more or fewer ideas, according to the 
sense, popular or scientific, in which it is used. “ The 
popular signification of a word is formed by degrees, and 
while all the facts it represents are present. As often as a 
fact comes before us which seems to answer to the sicmifi- 

O 

cation of a known term, this term is naturally applied to 
it, and thus its signification goes on broadening and deep¬ 
ening, till, at last, all the various facts and ideas which, 
from the nature of things, ought to be brought together 
and embodied in the term, are collected and embodied in it. 
When, on the contrary, the signification of a word is 
determined by science, it is usually done by one or a very 
few individuals, who, at the time, are under the influence 
of some particular fact, which has taken possession of their 
imagination. Thus it comes to pass that scientific defini¬ 
tions are, in general, much narrower, and, on that very 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


275 


account, much less correct, than the popular significations 
given to words.” 

It is this continual incorporation of new facts and ideas, 
— circumstances originally accidental,— into the perma¬ 
nent significations of words, which makes the dictionary 
definition of a word so poor an exponent of its real mean¬ 
ing. For a time this definition suffices; but in the lapse of 
time many nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning 
adhere to the word, which whoever attempts to use it with 
no other guide than the dictionary is sure to confound. 
Hence the ludicrous blunders made by foreigners, whose 
knowledge of a language is gained only from books; and 
hence the reason why, in any language, there are so few 
exact synonyms. 

How many persons who oppose compulsory education, 
have been frightened by the word “ compulsory,” attaching 
to it ideas of tyranny and degradation! How many per¬ 
sons are there in every community, who, in the language 
of Milton, 

“ Bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, 

And still revolt when the truth would make them free; 

License they mean when they cry liberty , 

For who love that, must first be wise and good.” 

Who can estimate the amount of mischief which has been 
done to society by such phrases as “ Liberty, Equality, and 
Fraternity,” and other such “ rabble-charming words,” as 
South calls them, “ which have so much wildfire wrapped 
up in them”? How many persons who declaim passion¬ 
ately about “the majesty of the people,” “the sovereignty 
of the people,” have ever formed for themselves any defin¬ 
ite conceptions of what they mean by these expressions ? 
Locke has well said of those who have the words “ wis¬ 
dom,” “ glory,” “ grace,” constantly at their tongue’s end, 


276 


words; their use and abuse. 


that if they should be asked what they mean by them, 
they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer. 
Even Locke himself, who has written so ably on the abuse 
of words, has used some of the cardinal and vital terms 
in his philosophy in different senses. La Harpe says that 
the express object of the entire “Essay on the Human 
Understanding” is to demonstrate rigorously that Ventende- 
ment est esprit et d'une nature essentiellement distincte de 
la matiere ; yet the author has used the words “ reflection,” 
“ mind,” “ spirit,” so vaguely that he has been accused of 
holding doctrines subversive of all moral distinctions. Even 
the eagle eye of Newton could not penetrate the obscur¬ 
ity of Locke’s language, and on reading the “ Essay ” he 
took its author for a Hobbist. De Maistre declares the 
title a misnomer; instead of being called an “Essay on 
the Human Understanding,” it should be entitled, he 
thinks, an “Essay on the Understanding of Locke.” 

Again, what an amount of error is wrapped up in what 
have been called the regulation-labels of philosophy; as, 
for example, when a writer is called a “pantheist” in 
religion, an “intuitionist” in ethics, an “absolutist” in 
politics, etc., etc.! Classifications of this sort, made, as 
they generally are, without judgment, discrimination, or 
qualification, are the greatest foes of true knowledge. It 
is probable that in nine cases out of ten, the persons who 
confidently label Mr. Emerson as a “pantheist” or “intu¬ 
itionist,” could neither define these terms accurately, nor 
put their fingers upon the passages in his writings which 
are supposed to justify their use. 

Professor Bowen notices a fallacy in a certain use of 
the word “tend.” When there is more than an even 
chance that a given result will occur, we may properly 


FALLACIES IK WOEDS. 


277 


say that it “tends” to happen; if there is less than an 
even chance, it “tends” not to happen. Thus, all persons 
who have attained the age of twenty-four survive, on an 
average , till they are sixty-two years old. But no one 
person , now aged twenty-four, has a right to expect that 
this average will be exemplified in his particular case. All , 
collectively, “tend” to the average; but no one “tends” 
to the average. Mr. Darwin, in his “Origin of Species 
by Natural Selection,” bases his theory on a fallacy in 
the use of the word “ tend.” “ He first argues that the 
specific Marks of Species, both in the animal and vegeta¬ 
ble kingdoms, ‘ tend ’ to vary, because, perhaps in one case 
out of ten thousand, a child is born with six fingers on 
one hand, or a cat with blue eyes, or a flower grows out of 
the middle of another flower. Collecting many instances of 
such sports of nature or monstrosities, he bases his whole 
theory upon them, forgetting that the vastly larger num¬ 
ber of normal growths and developments proves that the 
‘tendency’ is to non-variation. Then, secondly, because, 
perhaps, one out of a hundred of these abnormal Marks is 
transmitted by inheritance, he assumes that these freaks 
of nature tend to perpetuate themselves in a distinct race, 
and thus to become permanent Marks of distinct species. 
Thirdly, as either of the two preceding points, taken 
singly, affords no basis whatever for his doctrine, he 
assumes that their joint occurrence is probable, because he 
has made out what is, in truth, a very faint probability 
that each may separately happen. But if the chance of a 
variation in the first instance is only one out of a thousand, 
and that of the anomaly being handed down by descent 
is one out of a hundred, the probability of a variation 
established by inheritance is but one out of a hundred 


278 


words; their use aetd abuse. 


thousand. As the theory further requires the cumulation 
of an indefinite number of such variations, one upon 
another, the formation of a new species by the Darwinian 
process may safely be pronounced to be incredible.” 

In treating of the difference between “ the disgraceful ” 
and “ the indecent,” Archbishop Whately observes that 
the Greeks and the Romans, unfortunately, had not, like 
ourselves, a separate word for each; turpe and aic/pos 
served to express both. Upon this ambiguity some of 
the ancient philosophers, especially the Cynics, founded 
paradoxes, by which they bewildered themselves and their 
hearers. It is an interesting fact that the Saxon part of 
our language, containing a smaller percentage of synon¬ 
ymous words that are liable to be confounded, is much 
freer from equivocation than the Romanic. Of four 
hundred and fifty words discriminated by Whately, in his 
treatise on synonyms, less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon. 
On the other hand, it has been noted by the same writer 
that the double origin of our language, from Saxon and 
Norman, often enables a sophist to seem to render a reason, 
when he is only repeating the assertion in synonymous 
words of a different family: e.g., “To allow every man an 
unbounded freedom of speech must be always, on the 
whole, highly advantageous to the State; for it is extremely 
conducive to the interests of the community that each 
individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of 
expressing his sentiments.” So the physician in Moliere 
accounted for opium producing sleep by saying that it 
had a soporific virtue. Again, there is a large class of 
words employed indiscriminately, neither because they ex¬ 
press precisely the same ideas, nor because they enable the 
sophist to confound things that are essentially different, 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


279 


but because they convey no distinct ideas whatever, except 
of the moral character of him who uses them. “77 m'ap- 
pelle ,” says Paul Louis Courier, speaking of an opponent, 
“ jacobin , revolutionnaire , plagiaire, voleur, empoissonneur, 
faussaire, pestifere ou pestifere , enrage , imposteur, calom- 
niateur , libelliste , homme horrible, ordurier, grimacier, 
chiffonnier , . . . Je vois ce qiCil veut dire ; entend que 
lui et moi sommes d'avis different.'" 

It is an old trick of controversialists, noticed in a pre¬ 
vious chapter, to employ “question-begging” words that 
determine disputes summarily without facts or arguments. 
Thus political parties and religious sects quietly beg the 
questions at issue between them by dubbing themselves 
“ the Democrats ” and “ the Republicans ”, or “ the Ortho¬ 
dox” and “the Liberals”; though the orthodoxy of the one 
may consist only in opposition to somebody else’s doxy, and 
the- liberality of the other may differ from bigotry only in 
the fact that the bigots are liberal only to one set of opin¬ 
ions, while the Liberals are bigoted against all. So with 
the argument of what is called the Selfish School of Moral 
Philosophers, who deny that man ever acts from purely 
disinterested motives. The whole superstructure of their 
degrading theory rests upon a confounding of the term 
“ self-love ” with “ selfishness.” If I go out to walk, and, 
being overtaken by a shower, spread my umbrella to save 
myself from a wetting, never once, all the while, thinking 
of my friends, my country, or of anybody, in short, but 
myself, will it be pretended that this act, though performed 
exclusively for self, was in any sense selfish? As well might 
you say that the cultivation of an “ art ” makes a man 
“artful”; that one who gets his living by any “craft” is 
necessarily “crafty”; that a man skilled in “design” is a 


280 


words; their use and abuse 


“ designing ” man; or that a man who forms a “ project” is, 
therefore, a “projector.” 

Derivatives do not always retain the force of their 
primitives. Wearing woolen clothes does not make a man 
sheepish. A representative does not, and should not, always 
represent the will of his constituents (that is, in the 
sense of voting as they wish, or being their mere spokes¬ 
man ); for they may clamor for measures opposed to the 
Constitution, which he has sworn to support. Self-love, in 
the highest degree, implies no disregard of the rights of 
others; whereas Selfishness is always sacrificing others to 
itself,— it contains the germ of every crime, and fires its 
neighbor’s house to roast its own eggs. 

What towering structures of fallacy conservatives have 
often built upon the twofold meaning of the word “old”! 
Strictly, it denotes the length of time that any object has 
existed; but it is often employed, instead of “ancient,” to 
denote distance of time. Because old men are generally the 
wisest and most experienced, opinions and practices handed 
down to us from the “ old times ” of ignorance and super¬ 
stition, when the world was comparatively in its youth, it is 
thought must be entitled to the highest respect. The truth 
is, as Sydney Smith says, “ of living men the oldest has, 
ceteris paribus , the most experience; of generations, the 
oldest has the least experience. Our ancestors, up to the 
Conquest, were children in arms; chubby boys in the time 
of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in 
the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white- 
bearded, silver-headed ancients, who have treasured up, 
and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which 
human life can supply.” Again, how many tedious books, 
pamphlets, and newspaper articles have been written to 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


281 


prove that education should consist of mental discipline,— 
founded on an erroneous derivation of the word from 
educere , “ to draw out.” Does education, it is asked, con¬ 
sist in filling the child’s mind as a cistern is filled with 
water brought in buckets from some other source, or in the 
opening up of its own fountains? The fact is, education 
comes not from educere, but from educare, which means “ to 
nourish,” “ to foster,” to do just what the nurse does. 
Educit obstetrix , says Cicero, educat nutrix, instituit pceda- 
gogas. It is food, above all things, which the growing 
mind craves; and the mind’s food is knowledge. Disci¬ 
pline, training, healthful development is, indeed, necessary, 
but it should form a part only, not usurp the lion’s share, 
of education. In an ideal system this and the nourishing 
of the mind by wholesome knowledge would proceed simul¬ 
taneously. The school lesson would feed the mind, while 
the thorough, patient and conscientious acquisition of it 
would gymnaze the intellect and strengthen the moral 
force. Why have one class of studies for discipline only, 
and another class for nourishment only, when there are 
studies which at once fill the mind with the materials of 
thinking, and develop the power of thought,— which, at the 
same time, impart useful knowledge, and afford an intellec¬ 
tual gymnastic? Is a merchant, whose business compels 
him to walk a dozen miles a day, to be told that he must 
walk another dozen for the sake of exercise, and for that 
alone? Yet not less preposterous, it seems to us, is the rea¬ 
soning of a class of educators who would range on one side 
the practically useful and on the other the educational, and 
build high between them a partition wall. 

If a man, by mastering Chilling worth, learns how to 
reason logically at the same time that he learns the princi- 


282 


words; their use and abuse. 


pies of Protestantism, must he study logic in Whately or 
Jevens? One of the disadvantages of an education of which 
discipline, pure and simple, is made the end, is that the 
discipline, being disagreeable, too often ends with the 
school-days; whereas the discipline gained agreeably, in¬ 
stead of being associated with disgust, would be continued 
through life. It is possible that the muscular discipline 
which the gymnasium gives is greater while it lasts than 
that which is gained by a blacksmith or other laborer in 
his daily work; but whose muscles are more developed, 
the man’s who practises a few months or years in a gym¬ 
nasium, or the man's whose calling compels him to use his 
muscles all his life? What would the graduate of the gym¬ 
nasium do, if hugged by a London coal-heaver? 

Again, the reader of Macaulay’s “ History of England ” 
will recollect the hot and long-protracted debates in Parlia¬ 
ment in 1696, upon the question whether James II had 
“abdicated” or “deserted” the crown,— the Lords insist¬ 
ing upon the former, the Commons upon the latter, term. 
He will also recall the eloquent and fierce debate by the 
Lords upon the motion that they should subscribe an 
instrument, to which the Commons had subscribed, recog¬ 
nizing William as “ rightful and lawful king of England.” 
This they refused to do, but voted to declare that he had 
the right by law to the English crown, and that no other 
person had any right whatever to that crown. The dis¬ 
tinction between the two propositions, observes Macaulay, 
a Whig may, without any painful sense of shame, acknowl¬ 
edge to be beyond the reach of his faculties, and leave to 
be discussed by high churchmen. The distinction between 
“abdicate” and “desert,” however, is an important one, 
obvious almost at a glance. Had Parliament declared 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


283 


that James had “deserted” the throne, they would have 
admitted that it was not only his right, but his duty, to 
return, as in the case of a husband who had deserted his 
wife, or a soldier who had deserted his post. By declaring 
that he had “ abdicated ” the throne, they virtually asserted 
that he had voluntarily relinquished the crown, and for¬ 
feited all right to it forever. 

Among the ambiguous words which at this day lead to 
confusion of thought, one of the most prominent is the 
word, “unity.” There are not a few Christians who con¬ 
found what the Apostles say concerning “ unity ” of spirit, 
faith, etc., with unity of church government, and infer, 
because the church,— that is, the church universal,— is 
one , as having one common Head, one Spirit, one Father, 
it must, therefore, be one as a society. “Church unity” 
is a good thing, so long as it does not involve the sacrifice 
of a denomination’s life or principles; but there are cases 
where it amounts to absorption. It sometimes resembles 
too closely that peculiar union which the boa-constrictor 
is so fond of consummating between itself and the goat. 
It is exceedingly fond of goats; but when the union is 
complete, there is not a trace of the goat,— it is all boa- 
constrictor. 

Hardly any ambiguous word has been more fruitful of 
controversy than the word “ person,” as used in the phrase, 
“the three Persons of the Trinity.” If there are three 
Persons, or personalities, in the Trinity, then there must 
be, it is argued, three Gods. It is true, the word “person” 
implies a numerically distinct substance; but the theologi¬ 
cal meaning is very different. The word is derived from 
the Latin persona, which denotes the state, quality, or 
condition, whereby one man differs from another, as shown 


284 


words: their use and abuse. 


by the phrases personam induere , personam agere , etc. 
Cicero says: “ Tres personas unus snstineo ; meam , adver- 
sarii , judicis; I, being one, sustain three characters, my 
own, that of my client, and that of the judge.” Arch¬ 
bishop Whately thinks it probable that the Latin fathers 
meant by “ person ” to convey the same idea as did the 
Greek theologians by the word “hypostasis,”—that which 
stands under (i.e., is the subject of) attributes. 

The confusion of “opposite” and “contrary” is a source 
of not a little fallacious reasoning in ethics and in politics. 
In every good system of government there are contriv¬ 
ances and adjustments by which a force acting in one 
direction may, at a certain point, be met and arrested by 
an opposite force. We see this illustrated by the “gov¬ 
ernor” of a steam engine, by which the supply of steam 
is checked as the velocity is increased, and enlarged as the 
velocity is diminished. This system of “checks and bal¬ 
ances,” as it is termed, is often sneered at by theoretical 
politicians, simply because they do not discriminate be¬ 
tween things “ opposite ” and things “ contrary.” Things 
“ opposite ” complete each other, their action producing 
a common result compounded of the two; things “con¬ 
trary” antagonize and exclude each other. The most 
“opposite” mental or moral qualities may meet in the 
same person; but “contrary” qualities, of course, cannot. 
The right hand and the left are “opposites”; but right 
and wrong are “ contraries.” Sweet and sour are “ oppo¬ 
sites”; sweet and bitter are “contraries.” As it has been 
happily said, “opposites” unfold themselves in different 
directions from the same root, as the positive and nega¬ 
tive forces of electricity, and in their very opposition 
uphold and sustain one another; while “contraries” en- 


FALLACIES IK WORDS. 


285 


counter one another from quarters quite diverse, and one 
subsists only in the exact degree that it puts out of 
working the other. 

Not a few of our English particles are equivocal in 
their signification, especially “and 11 and “or.” The dual 
meaning of the latter particle, which may imply either 
that two objects or propositions are equivalent, if not 
identical, or that they are unlike, if not contradictory, is 
a fruitful source of misunderstanding and confusion. The 
conjunction “ and” is hardly less indefinite and equivocal. 
This is illustrated in the case of Stradling vs. Stiles , in 
“ Martinus Scriblerus,” familiar to the readers of Pope, 
where, in a supposed will, a testator, possessed of six black 
horses, six white horses, and six pied, or black-and-white 
horses, bequeathed to A. B. “all my black and white 
horses.” The question, thereupon, rose whether the be¬ 
quest carried the black horses, and the white horses, or 
the black-and-white horses only. The equivocation could 
have been avoided by writing “all my black and all my 
white horses,” or, “all my pied horses”; still, it is evident 
that our language needs a new conjunctive. 

Sir William Hamilton points out a defect in our philo¬ 
sophical language, in which the terms “ idea,” “ concep¬ 
tion,” “notion,” are used as almost convertible to denote 
objects so different as the images of sense and the un- 
picturable notions of intelligence. The confusion thus 
produced is avoided in the German, “the richest in meta¬ 
physical expressions of any living tongues,” in which the 
two kinds of objects are carefully distinguished. 

Again, how many systems of error in metaphysics and 
ethics have been based upon the etymologies of words, the 
sophist assuming that the meaning of a word must always 


286 


words; their use and abuse. 


be that which it, or its root, originally bore! Thus Horne 
Tooke tries to prove by a wide induction that since all 
particles,— that is, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunc¬ 
tions,—were originally nouns and verbs, they must be so 
still; a species of logic which would prove that man, if the 
Darwinian theory be true, is still a reptile. In a similar 
way the same writer has reached the conclusion that there 
is no eternal truth, since “ truth,” according to its etymology, 
is simply what one “trowetli,” that is, what one thinks 
or believes. This theory, it is thought, was suggested to 
Tooke by a conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,” 
an imperative of the verb “ to give ”; but as it has been 
shown, from cognate forms in other languages, that this 
particle has no connection with the verb “ to give,” or any 
other verb, any system founded on this basis is a mere 
castle in the air. Truth, argues Tooke, supposes mankind; 
for whom, and by whom alone the word is formed, and to 
whom alone it is applicable. “If no man, then no truth. 
There is no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting 
truth, unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also 
eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may 
contradict each other, and yet both speak truth, for the 
truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of 
another.” 

Even if we admit this derivation of “truth,” the 
conclusion does not follow; for whatever the word once 
meant, it now means that which is certain, whether we 
think it or not. If we are to be governed wholly by 
etymology, we must maintain that a “beldam” is a “ fine 
lady,” that “priest” can mean only “ advanced in years,” 
and that “Pontifex” can only signify “a bridge-builder.” 
But Horne Tooke’s etymology has been disputed by the very 


FALLACIES IK WORDS. 


287 


highest authority. According to Mr. Garnett, an acute 
English philologist, “ truth ” is derived “ from the Sanscrit 
dhra , ‘ to be established,’— fixum esse; whence dhruwa, 
‘certain,’ i.e. ‘established’; German, trauen , ‘to rely,’ 
‘trust’; treu , ‘faithful,’ ‘true’; Anglo-Saxon, treow- 
treowth ( fides)\ English, ‘true,’ ‘truth.’ To these we 
may add Gothic, triggons ; Icelandic, trygge ; (jidus, 
securus, tutus): all from the same root, and all conveying 
the same idea of stability or security. ‘ Truth,’ therefore, 
neither means what is thought nor what is said , but that 
which is permanent, stable, and is and ought to be relied 
upon, because, upon sufficient data, it is capable of being 
demonstrated or shown to exist. If we admit this ex¬ 
planation, Tooke’s assertions . . . become Vox et preterea 
nihil. 

Some years ago a bulky volume of seven hundred pages 
octavo was written by Dr. Johnson, a London physician, 
to prove that “might makes right,”—that justice is the 
result, not of divine instinct, but purely and simply of 
arbitrary decree. The foundation for this equally falla¬ 
cious and dangerous theory was the fact that “ right ” is 
derived from the Latin, rego, “to rule”; therefore whatever 
the rex, or “ ruler,” authorizes or decrees, is right! As well 
might he argue that only courtiers can be polite, because 
“ courtesy ” is borrowed from palaces, or that there can 
be no “heaven” or “hell” in the scriptural sense, because, 
in its etymological, the one is the canopy heaved over our 
heads, and the other is the hollow space beneath our feet. 
Indeed, we have seen an argument, founded on the ety¬ 
mology of the latter word, to prove that there is “ no hell 
beyond a hole in the ground.” In the same way, because 
our primitive vocabulary is derived solely from sensible 


288 


words; their use and abuse. 


images, it has been assumed that the mind has no ideas 
except those derived through the senses, and that thought 
therefore is only sensation. But neither idealism nor 
materialism can derive any support from the phenomena 
of language, for the names we give either to outward 
objects or to our conceptions of immaterial entities can 
give us no conception of the things themselves. It is 
true that in every-day language we talk of color, smell, 
thickness, shape, etc., not only as sensations within us, but 
as qualities inherent in the things themselves; but it has 
long since been shown that they are only modifications of 
our consciousness. It has been justly said that our knowl¬ 
edge of beings is purely indirect, limited, relative; it does 
not reach to the beings themselves in their absolute reality 
and essences, but only to their accidents, their modes, their 
relations, limitations, differences, and qualities; all which 
are manners of conceiving and knowing which not only 
do not impart to knowledge the absolute character which 
some persons attribute to it, but even positively exclude it. 
“ Even substance is but a purely hypothetical postulated 
residuum after the abstraction of all observable qualities.” 
If, then, our conception of an object in no way resembles 
the object,— if heat, for example, can be, in no sense, 
like a live coal, nor pain like the pricking of a pin,— 
much less can a word by which we denote an object be 
other than a mere hieroglyphic, or teach us a jot or tittle 
about the world of sense or thought. Again, the fact 
that “spirit” once signified “breath,” and animus, avefioq, 
“ air,” lends no countenance to materialism. “ When we 
impose on a phenomenon of the physical order a moral 
denomination, we do not thereby spiritualize matter; and 
because we assign a physical denomination to a moral 


FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


289 


phenomenon, we do not materialize spirit.” Even if the 
words by which we designate mental conceptions are de¬ 
rived from material analogies, it does not follow that our 
conceptions were themselves originally material; and we 
shall in vain try to account by any external source for 
the relations of words among themselves. It is told of 
the metaphysician, Cudworth, that, in reply to a person who 
ridiculed the doctrine of innate ideas, he told him to take 
down the first book that came to hand in his library, open 
at random, and read. The latter opened Cicero’s “Offices,” 

and began reading the first sentence, “ Quamquam -” 

“Stop!” cried Cudworth, “it is enough. Tell me how 
through the senses you acquire the idea of quamquam .” 

It is a mistake to suppose that a language is no more 
than a mere collection of words. The terms we employ 
are symbols only, which can never fully express our 
thought, but shadow forth far more than it is in their 
power distinctly to impart. Lastly, there are in every 
language, as another has truly said, a vast number of 
words, such as “ sacrifice,” “ sacrament,” “ mystery,” 
“ eternity,” which may be explained by the idea, though 
the idea cannot be discovered by the word, as is the case 
with whatever belongs to the mystery of the mind; and 
this of itself is enough to disprove the conclusion which 
nominalists would draw from the origin of words, and to 
prove that, whatever the derivation of “ truth,” its ety¬ 
mology can establish nothing concerning its essence; and 
we are still at liberty to regard it as independent, immu¬ 
table, and eternal, having its archetype in the Divine 
mind. 

Among the terms used in literary criticism, few are 
more loosely employed than the word “ creative ” as ap- 



290 


words; their use and abuse. 


plied to men of genius. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, are 
said to have “creative power”; and, as a figure of speech, 
the remark is true enough: but, strictly speaking, only 
Omnipotence can create ; man can only combine. The 
genius of a great painter may fill his gallery with the 
most fantastic representations, but every piece of which 
his paintings are composed exists in nature. Few artists 
have been more original than Claude Lorraine; yet all his 
paintings were composed of picturesque materials gathered 
from different scenes in nature, united with consummate 
taste and skill, and idealized by his exquisite imagination. 
To make a modern statue there is a great melting down 
of old bronze. The essence of originality is not that it 
creates new material, but that it invents new combinations 
of material, and imparts new life to whatever it discovers 
or combines, whether of new or old. Shakespeare’s genius 
is at no other time so incontestably sovereign as when he 
borrows most,— when he adapts or moulds, in a manner 
so perfect as to resemble a new creation, the old chronicles 
and “ Italian originals,” which have been awaiting the 
vivida vis that makes them live and move. Non nova , sed 
novd, sums up the whole philosophy of the subject. “ Orig¬ 
inality,” says an able writer, “ never works more fruitfully 
than in a soil rich and deep with the foliage of ages.” 

The word “ same ” is often used in a way that leads to 
error. Persons say “ the same ” when they mean similar. 
It has been asked whether the ship Argo, in which Jason 
sought the Golden Fleece, and whose decaying timbers, as 
she lay on the Greek shore, a grateful and reverent nation 
had patched up, till, in process of time, not a plank of the 
original ship was left, was still “ the same ” ship as of old. 
The question presents no difficulty, if we remember that 


FALLACIES IU WORDS. 


291 


“ sameness,” that is “ identity,” is an absolute term, and can 
be affirmed or denied only in an absolute sense. No man 
is the same man to-day that he was yesterday, though he 
may be very similar to his yesterday’s self. 

A common source of confusion in language is what 
logicians call “amphibolous” sentences,— that is, sentences 
that are equivocal, not from a double sense in any word, 
but because they admit of a double construction. Quin¬ 
tilian mentions several cases where litigation arose from 
this kind of ambiguity in the wording of a will. In one 
case a testator expressed a wish that a statue should be 
erected, and used the following language: poni statuam 
auream hastam in manu tenentem. The question arose 
whether it was the statue, or the spear only, that was to 
be of gold. It is well known that punctuation was un¬ 
known to the Greeks and Romans; and hence the ancient 
oracles were able to deliver responses, which, written down 
by the priests and delivered to the inquirers, were adapted, 
through the ambiguity thus caused, to save the credit of 
the' oracle, whether the expected event was favorable or 
unfavorable. An example of this is the famous response, 
Aio te JEacida Romanos vincere posse ; which may mean 
either, “Thou, Pyrrhus, I say, slmlt subdue the Romans;” 
or, “ I say, Pyrrhus, that the Romans shall subdue thee.” 
A better illustration is the remarkable response which was 
given when an oracle was consulted regarding the success 
of a certain military expedition: Ibis et redibis nunquam 
peribis in bello , which, not being punctuated, might have 
been translated either: “Thou shalt go, and shalt never 
return, thou shalt perish in battle;” or, “Thou shalt go 
and return, thou shalt never perish in battle.” We have 
an example of amphibolous sentences in English in the 


292 


words; their use and abuse. 


witch prophecy, “ The Duke yet lives that Henry shall 
depose,” and in the words cited by Whately from the 
Nicene Creed, “ by whom all things were made,” which 
are grammatically referable either to the Father or to the 
Son. 

Among the fallacies in words may be classed those false 
impressions which some writers contrive to give, while at 
the same time making no single statement that is untrue 
or exceptionable. Thus in Gibbon’s famous history, it is 
not by what he expressly says regarding Christianity, that 
he misleads the reader, but by what he suppresses, hints, and 
insinuates. As Paley long ago observed, the subtle error 
rather lies hid in the sinuous folds than is directly appar¬ 
ent on the surface of the polished style. Never openly 
attacking Christianity, or advancing any opinions which 
he might find it difficult to defend, he yet contrives to 
leave an impression adverse to the theory of its divine 
origin. In like manner, it is not usually by false state¬ 
ments that Hume perverts the truth of English history; 
but his unfairness secretes itself so subtly in the turns of 
the words, that, when you seek to point it out, it is gone. 

Even the Natural Sciences, in which precision of lan¬ 
guage is vital, are disfigured by words which, if closely 
scrutinized, are found to be full of error. It is true that 
as the progress of inquiry brings fresh facts into view, 
the words which serve to illustrate exploded theories are 
usually rejected; yet names are sometimes retained after 
they cease to be correct or expressive. The word “ electric¬ 
ity ” suggests thunder-storms, shocks at scientific soirees, 
and Morse’s telegraph; yet it means only “ the amber- 
force.” The explanation of this name is that the observa¬ 
tion of the fact that amber, when rubbed, attracts to itself 


THE FALLACIES IM WORDS. 


293 


light bodies, was the first step taken toward the establish¬ 
ment of this marvellous science. So the name “ oxygen,” 
or “ the acid-producer,” was given to the gas so called, 
when it was considered to be the cause of acidity. In 1774 
the gas called “ muriatic acid ” was renamed by Scheele, in 
consequence of certain discoveries made by him, “ dephlo- 
gisticated muriatic acid.” By and by the doctrine of phlo¬ 
giston was exploded, and Lavoisier, having to modify the 
name, changed it to “ oxymuriatic,” or “ oxygenized muri¬ 
atic acid.” When, again, it was found that this pungent 
gas was a simple body, and actually entered into the consti¬ 
tution of the muriatic, or, as it is now called, hydrochloric 
acid,— that the oxygen merely withdrew from the latter 
the second constituent, viz., hydrogen,—the name had to 
be altered again, and this time Sir Humphrey Davy sug¬ 
gested “ chlorine,” or “ the green gas,” which seems likely 
to be permanent. Again, until lately, “caloric” was a 
term in constant use among chemists, and designated some¬ 
thing that produced heat. Now this doctrine is abandoned, 
and heat is said to be the result of molecular and ethereal 
vibration. All matter is supposed to be immersed in a 
highly elastic medium, which is called “ ether.” But what 
is this “ether,” of which heat, light, electricity, and sound, 
are only so many different modes or manifestations? 
“‘Ether’ is a myth,— an abstraction, useful, no doubt, for 
the purpose of physical speculation, but intended rather to 
mark the present horizon of our knowledge, than to repre¬ 
sent anything which we can grasp either with our senses 
or our reason.” * 

The form of cerebral congestion known as “ sunstroke,” 
was erroneously so named from the popular belief that it 
♦Max Muller’s “Science of Language,” Vol. II, p. 600. 


294 


words: their use and abuse. 


is caused by a sudden concentration of the sun’s rays upon 
a focal point. It is now well known that persons may be 
attacked by this disease who have not been exposed to the 
sun’s rays,— that it occurs often at night,— and that its 
cause is not extreme heat only, but the exhaustion con¬ 
sequent upon over-exertion — especially of the brain — 
anxiety, and worry. 


CHAPTER XII. 


THE fallacies IN WORDS — ( continued ). 


I never learned rhetorike certain; 

Things that I speke, it mote be bare and plain.— Chaucer. 


Here is our great infelicity, that, when single words signify complex ideas, 
one word can never distinctly manifest all the parts of a complex idea.— 
Isaac Watts. 

If reputation attend these conquests which depend on the fineness and 
niceties of words, it is no wonder if the wit of men so employed should per¬ 
plex and subtilize the signification of sounds.— Locke. 



T has been remarked by Archbishop Whately that the 


words whose ambiguity is the most frequently over¬ 
looked, and produces the greatest amount of confusion of 
thought and fallacy, are the commonest,— the very ones 
whose meaning is supposed to be best understood. “ Familiar 
acquaintance is perpetually mistaken for accurate knowl¬ 
edge.” Such a word is “ luxury.” 

A favorite theme for newspaper declamations in these 
days is the luxury and extravagance of the American 
people, especially of the nonveaux riches whose fortunes 
have been of mushroom growth. It is easy to declaim 
thus against luxury,— that is, against the use of things 
which, at any particular period, are not deemed indispensa¬ 
ble to life, health, and comfort; but what do those who 
indulge in this cheap denunciation mean by the term? Is 
not luxury a purely relative term? Is there a single article 
of dress, food or furniture which can be pronounced an 
absolute luxury, without regard to the wealth or poverty of 
him who enjoys it? Are not the luxuries of one generation 


295 


296 


words; their use and abuse. 


or country the necessaries of another? Persons who are 
familiar with history know that Alfred the Great had not a 
chair to sit down upon, nor a chimney to carry off his 
smoke; that William the Conquerer was unacquainted 
with the luxury of a feather bed, if it can be called one; 
that the early aristocracy of England lived on the ground 
floor, without drainage; that in the Middle Ages shirts 
were deemed a useless superfluity, and men were even put 
in the pillory for wearing them; that night-shirts were 
esteemed a still more needless luxury, and persons of all 
ranks and classes slept in the first costume of Adam; that 
travelling carriages are an ingenious invention of modern 
effeminacy; that the men who first carried umbrellas in 
the streets, even in the severest rain-storms, were hooted at 
as dandies and coxcombs; that the nobles and dames of the 
most brilliant epochs of England’s annals ate with their 
fingers, generally in couples, out of one trencher on a bare 
table; and that when forks were introduced, they were 
long hotly opposed as an extravagance, and even denounced 
by many as a device of Satan, to offer an affront to Provi¬ 
dence, who had provided man with fingers to convey his 
food to his mouth. In the introduction to Hollinslied’s 
“ Chronicles,” published in 1577, there is a bitter complaint 
of the multitude of chimneys lately erected, of the exchange 
of straw pallets for mattresses or flock beds, and of wooden 
platters for earthenware and pewter. In another place, 
the writer laments that oak only is used for building, 
instead of willow as heretofore; adding, that “formerly 
our houses indeed were of willow, but our men were of 
oak; but now that our houses are of oak, our men are not 
only of willow, but some altogether of straw, which is a 
sore alteration.” 


THE FALLACIES IN' WORDS. 


297 


Erasmus tells us that salt beef and strong ale consti¬ 
tuted the chief part of Queen Elizabeth’s breakfast, and 
that similar refreshments were served to her in bed for 
supper. There is not a single able-bodied workingman in 
the United States who does not enjoy fare which would 
have been deemed luxurious by men of high station in 
the iron reign of the Tudors; hardly a thriving shop¬ 
keeper who does not occupy a house which English nobles 
in 1650 would have envied; hardly a domestic servant or 
factory girl who does not on Sundays adorn herself with 
apparel which would have excited the admiration of the 
duchesses in Queen Elizabeth’s ante-rooms. Xenophon ac¬ 
counts for the degeneracy of the Persians by their luxury, 
which, he says, was carried to such a pitch that they used 
gloves to protect their hands. Tea and coffee were once 
denounced as idle and injurious luxuries; and throughout 
the larger part of the world tooth-brushes, napkins, sus¬ 
penders, bathing-tubs, and a hundred other things now 
deemed indispensable to the health or comfort of civilized 
man, would be regarded as proofs of effeminacy and ex¬ 
travagance. 

Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denun¬ 
ciation by poets and moralists from time immemorial. 
But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals 
its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so 
pernicious as those springing from that indifference to 
comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with 
the name of contentment, but which is only another name 
for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodi¬ 
gality and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in 
poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of 
life,— by a too feeble development of those desires to 


298 


WORDS* THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


gratify which the mass. of men are striving. It is a bad 
sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of 
life, and aspires to nothing higher; and equally ominous 
is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied 
with the capital and glories it has already accumulated. 
Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality, 
it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon 
garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in 
the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man 
differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his 
wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being, 
and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. 
He must have many difficulties to contend with, many 
clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify, if you would 
bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they 
are always grumbling,— because, dissatisfied amid the 
most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more 
and more of what Voltaire calls les superflues cJioses , si 
n4cessaires ,— that the English people have reached their 
present pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth 
which almost enables them to defy a hostile world. 

Among the familiar words that we employ, few have 
been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry 
than “nature” and “art.” There are many persons who 
oppose the teaching of elocution, because they like a 
“natural” and “artless” eloquence, to which, they think, 
all elaborate training is opposed, Yet nothing is more 
certain than that nature and art, between which there 
is supposed to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often 
the very same thing. What is more natural than that a 
man who lacks vocal power should cultivate and develop 
his voice by vocal exercises; or that, if he is conscious of 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


299 


faults in his manner of speaking,— his articulation, ges¬ 
tures, etc.,— he should try, by the help of a good teacher, 
to overcome them? So with the style of a writer; what 
is more natural than for one who feels that he has not 
adequately expressed his thought, to blot the words first 
suggested and try others, and yet others, till he despairs 
of further improvement? There are subjects so deep and 
complex, ideas so novel and abstruse, that the most prac¬ 
tised writer cannot do justice to them without great labor. 
A conscientious author is, therefore, continually transpos¬ 
ing clauses, reconstructing sentences, substituting words, 
polishing and repolishing paragraphs; and this, unques- 
tianably, is “ art,” or the application of means to an end. 
But is this art inconsistent with nature? 

Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words “na¬ 
ture” and “natural,” as thus employed, is that which lurks 
in a popular use of the word “simplicity.” It has been 
happily said that while some men talk as if to speak 
naturally w*ere to speak like a natural, others talk as if 
to speak with simplicity meant to speak like a simpleton. 
But what is true “ simplicity,” as applied to literary 
composition? Is it old, worn-out commonplace,—“straw 
that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat,” 
as Carlyle says,— the shallowest ideas expressed in tame 
and insipid language? Or is it not rather 

“Nature to advantage dressed, 

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,’’— 

in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in 
the aptest and most impressive language? Those persons 
who declaim against the employment of art in speaking 
and writing, forget that we are all exceedingly artificial, 
conventional beings. Without training, a speaker is almost 


300 


words; their use and abuse. 


sure to be awkward, in gesture and unnatural in utter¬ 
ance. The very preacher who in the street forgets himself 
and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will 
become self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit, 
and speak in a falsetto key. It is to get rid of these 
artificial habits that “art” (which is the employment of 
proper means) is needed. 

How many controversies about the “ transmutation of 
Species,” and the “ fixity of Species,” would have been 
avoided, had the scientists who use these phrases fully 
pondered their meaning, or rather no-meaning! Some 
writers have tried to explain the law of constancy in 
transmission, and its independence of the law of varia¬ 
tion, by maintaining that it is the Species only, not the 
individual, which is reproduced. “ Species,” says Buffon, 
“ are the only beings in nature.” A sheep, it is said, is 
always and everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, repro¬ 
ducing the specific type , but not necessarily reproducing 
any individual peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking 
example of the confusion which results from the intro¬ 
duction of old metaphysical ideas into science. It is evi¬ 
dent, as a late writer has clearly shown, that Species 
cannot reproduce itself, for Species does not exist. It is 
an entit}^, an abstract idea, not a concrete fact. 

The thing Species no more exists than the thing Good¬ 
ness or the thing Whiteness. “ Nature only knows indi¬ 
viduals. A collection of individuals so closely resembling 
each other as all sheep resemble each other, are conven¬ 
iently classed under one general term, Species; but this 
general term has no objective existence; the abstract or 
typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has no 
existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual 


THE FALLACIES IH WORDS. 


301 


sheep is born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep, 
whose structures and dispositions it reproduces; it is not 
the offspring of an abstract idea; it does not come into 
being at the bidding of a type, which as a Species sits 
apart, regulating ovine phenomena. . . If, therefore, 
‘transmutation of Species’ is absurd, ‘fixity of Species’ 
is not a whit less so. That which does not exist can 
neither be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only 
individuals exist; they resemble their parents, and they 
differ from their parents. Out of these resemblances we 
create Species; out of these differences we create Varie¬ 
ties; we do so as conveniences of classification, and then 
believe in the reality of our own figments.” * 

A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion, 
so tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship, 
and even want, in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor 
of those men who have lived to a good age in countries 
with a rocky soil and a bleak climate. What is more 
natural, it is argued, than that hardships should harden 
the constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of them 
live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons 
thus would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neg¬ 
lecting to feed and shelter his animals in their youth; 
nor if a dozen men, out of a hundred who had faced a 
battery, should survive and live to a good age, would he 
think of regarding the facing of batteries as conducive to 
longevity. The truth is, that early hardships, by destroy¬ 
ing all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the sur¬ 
vivors,— which latter is the cause, not the effect, of their 
having lived through such a training. So “ loading a gun- 
barrel to the muzzle, and firing it off, does not give it 
♦“Westminster Review,” September, 1856. 


302 


words; their use and abuse. 


strength; though it, proves, if it escape, that it was 
strong.” 

The revelations of travellers have dissipated the illu¬ 
sions which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and 
health of the Indians and other savages. The savage, it 
is now known, lives in a condition but one degree above 
starvation. If he sink below it, he disappears instantane¬ 
ously, as if he had never been. A certain amount of 
hardship he can endure; but it has limits, which if he 
passes, he sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no 
registrar or newspaper to record that a unit has been sub¬ 
tracted from the amount of human existence. It is true 
that severe diseases are rarely seen by casual visitors of 
savage tribes,— and why? Because death is their doctor, 
and the grave their hospital. When patients are left 
wholly to nature, nature presses very hard for an imme¬ 
diate payment of her debt. 

An ambiguous word, which has been a source of not a 
little error, is the adjective “ light,” which is used some¬ 
times in a literal, sometimes in a figurative sense. When 
writers on Agricultural Chemistry declare that what are 
called heavy soils are always specifically the lightest , the 
statement looks like a paradox. By “ heavy ” soils are 
meant, of course, not those which are the weightiest, but 
those which are ploughed with difficulty,— the effect being 
like that of dragging a heavy weight. So some articles 
of food are supposed to be light of digestion because they 
are specifically light . Again, there is a popular notion that 
strong drink must make men strong ; which is a double 
fallacy, since the word “ strong ” is applied to alcoholic 
liquors and to the human body in entirely different senses, 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


303 


and it is assumed that an effect must be like its cause, 
which is not true. 

Another ambiguous term, at least as popularly used, is 
“ murder.” There are persons who assert that the coup 
d'etat of Louis Napoleon, in 1851, was murder in the 
strictest sense of the term. To send out into the streets 
of a peaceful town a party of men dressed in uniform, 
with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and with orders 
to kill and plunder, is just as essentially murder and rob¬ 
bery, it is said, as to break into a house with half-a-dozen 
companions out of uniform, and do the same things. Was 
not Orsini’s crime, they ask, as truly a murder as when a 
burglar kills a man with a revolver in order to rob him ? 
So, again, there are Christian moralists, who, when asked 
for proof that suicide is sinful, adduce the Scriptural 
injunction, “ Thou shalt do no murder,” assuming that 
suicide, because it is called self-mwnfer, is a species of 
“ murder ” in the primary sense of the word. It is evi¬ 
dent, however, that most, if not all, of these assertions 
are founded on palpable fallacies. “ Murder ” is a techni¬ 
cal term, and means the wilful, deliberate killing, without 
just cause, and without certain specified excuses, of a man 
who belongs to a settled state of society, in which security 
is afforded to life and property. In all that is said about 
the atrocity of murder, there is a latent reference to this 
state of things. Were the “Vigilance Committee” of San 
Francisco murderers, when they executed criminals ille¬ 
gally? Are the men who “lynch” horse-thieves on our 
western frontiers, murderers? Were the rebels who, in 
our late Civil War, shot down Union soldiers, murderers? 

The common sentiment of the civilized world recog¬ 
nizes a vast difference between the rights and duties of 


304 


words; their use and abuse. 


sovereigns and subjects, and the relations of nations to 
each other, on the one hand, and the rights and duties of 
private individuals on the other; and hence the rules of 
public and those of private morality must be essentially 
different. According to legal authority, it is not murder 
to kill an alien enemy in time of war; nor is it murder 
to take away a man’s life by perjury. Revolutions and 
coups d'etat most persons will admit to be sometimes 
justifiable; and both, when justifiable, justify a certain 
degree of violence to person, to property, or to previous 
engagements. The difficulty is to tell just when, and how 
far, violence may justify and be justified. It has been 
well said by an acute and original writer that “it is by 
no means the same thing whether a man is plundered 
and wounded by burglars, or by the soldiers of an absolute 
king who is trying to maintain his authority. The sack 
of Perugia shocked the sensibilities of a great part of 
Europe; but if the Pope had privately poisoned one of his 
friends or servants from any purely personal motive, even 
the blindest religious zeal would have denounced him as 
a criminal unfit to live. A man must be a very bitter 
Liberal indeed, who really maintains that the violation by 
a sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands on 
precisely the same footing as deliberate perjury in an 
ordinary court of justice.” Suicide, it is evident, lacks 
the most essential characteristic of murder, namely, its 
inhumanity ,— the injury done to one’s neighbor and to 
others by the insecurity they are made to feel. Can a man 
rob himself? If not, how can he, in the proper sense of 
the word, murder himself ? 

Take another case. When Napoleon Bonaparte was at 
the climax of his power, and the entire continent lay at 


THE FALLACIES IK WORDS. 


305 


his feet, he aimed a blow at the naval supremacy of 
England, which, had it taken effect, would have fatally 
crippled her resources. By a secret article in the Treaty 
of Tilsit, it was stipulated that he and Alexander, the 
czar of Russia, should take possession of the fleets of the 
Neutral Powers. Mr. Canning, the British Prime Min¬ 
ister, saw the peril, and instantly, upon learning of the 
intrigue, dispatched a naval force under Nelson to Copen¬ 
hagen, which captured the Danish fleet, the object of the 
confederates, and conveyed it to Portsmouth. The viola¬ 
tion of the law of nations involved in this act was vehe¬ 
mently denounced in the pulpit, in parliament, and on 
the hustings; and to-day there are many persons who 
regard the audacious measure as little better than piracy. 
The world, however, has not sustained the charge. Prob¬ 
lems arise in the life of both men and nations, for the 
solution of which the ordinary rules of ethics are insuffi¬ 
cient. It is possible to kill without being guilty of mur¬ 
der, to rob without being a thief, and to break the law 
of nations without being a buccaneer. The justification 
of the British Minister lay in the fact that Denmark was 
powerless to resist the Continental powers, and that her 
coveted fleet, if not seized by England, would have been 
used against her. 

There is hardly any word which is oftener turned into 
an instrument of the fallacy of ambiguity than “ theory.” 
There is a class of men in every community, of limited edu¬ 
cation and narrow observation, who, because they have 
mingled in the world and dealt with affairs, claim to be 
preeminently practical men, and ridicule the opinions of 
thinkers in their closets as the speculations of “ mere 
theorists Not discriminating carefully between the word 


306 WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 

“ general ” and the word “ abstract,” and regarding as 
abstract principles what are in nearly all cases general prin¬ 
ciples, they regard all theorizing as synonymous with vis¬ 
ionary speculation; while that which they call “ practical 
knowledge,” and which they fancy to be wholly devoid of 
supposition or guesswork, but which is nothing else than a 
heap of hasty deductions from scanty and inaccurately 
observed phenomena, they deem more trustworthy than the 
discoveries of science and the conclusions of reason. Yet, 
when correctly defined, this very practical knowledge, so 
boastfully opposed to theory, in reality presupposes it. 
True practical knowledge is simply a ready discernment of 
the proper modes and seasons of applying to the common 
affairs of life those general truths and principles which are 
deduced from an extensive and accurate observation of 
facts, by minds stored with various knowledge, accustomed 
to investigation, and trained to the art of reasoning; or, in 
other words, by theorists. Every man who attempts to 
trace the causes or effects of an occurrence that falls under 
his persona] observation, theorizes. The only essential dis¬ 
tinction, in most cases, between “ practical ” men and those 
whom they denounce as visionary, is, not that the latter 
alone indulge in speculation, but that the theories of the 
former are based on the facts of their own experience,— 
those that happen within a narrow sphere, and in a single 
age; while the conclusions of the latter are deduced from 
the facts of all ages and countries , minutely analyzed and 
compared. 

Thus the “ practical ” farmer does not hesitate to con¬ 
sult the neighboring farmers, and to make use of the 
results of their experience concerning the best soils for cer¬ 
tain crops, the best manures for those soils, etc.; yet if 


THE FALLACIES IH WORDS. 


307 


another farmer, instead of availing himself of his neighbors’ 
experiences only, consults a book or books containing the 
digested and classified results of a thousand farmers’ experi¬ 
ences touching the same points, he is called, by a strange 
inconsistency, “ a book-farmer,” “ a mere theorist.” The 
truth is, the “ practical ” man, so called, extends his views 
no farther than the fact before him. Even when he is so 
fortunate as to learn its cause, the discovery is compara¬ 
tively useless, since it affords no light in new and more 
complex cases. The scientific man, unsatisfied with the 
observation of one fact, collects many, and by tracing the 
points of resemblance, deduces a comprehensive truth of 
universal application. “ Practical” men conduct the details 
of ordinary business with a masterly hand. As Burke said 
of George Grenville, they do admirably well so long as 
things move on in the accustomed channel, and a new and 
troubled scene is not opened; but they are not fitted to 
contend successfully with the difficulties of an untried and 
hazardous situation. When “ the high roads are broken 
up, and the waters are out,” when a new state of things is 
presented, and “ the line affords no precedent,” then it is 
that they show a mind trained in a subordinate sphere, 
formed for servile imitation, and destined to borrow its 
lights of another. “Expert men,” says Bacon, “can exe¬ 
cute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but 
the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of 
affairs, come best from those that are learned.” 

Among the current phrases of the day, by which men 
are led into error, one of the commonest is the expression 
“ doing good.” Properly understood, “ to do good ” is to do 
right; but the phrase has acquired a technical sense which 
is much narrower. It means, not discharging faithfully 


308 


words; their use and abuse. 


the duties of one’s calling, but stepping aside from its 
routine to relieve the poor, the distressed, and the ignorant; 
or to reform the sinful. The lawyer who, for a fee, con¬ 
scientiously gives advice, or pleads in the courts, is not 
thought to be doing good; but he is so regarded if he gra¬ 
tuitously defends a poor man or a widow. A merchant 
who sells good articles at fair prices, and pays his notes 
punctually, is not doing good; but he is doing good, if he 
carries broth and blankets to beggars, teaches in a Sunday 
School, supports a Young Men’s Christian Association, or 
distributes tracts to the irreligious. Charitable and philan¬ 
thropic societies of every kind are all recognized as organs 
for doing good; but the common pursuits of life,— law, 
medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, trading, etc.,— are 
not. 

The incorrectness of this view will be seen if we for a 
moment reflect what would become of society, including its 
charitable institutions and philanthropists, should its differ¬ 
ent members refuse to perform their respective functions. 
Society is a body corporate, which can exist,— at least, in a 
healthy state,— only on condition that each man performs 
the specific work which Providence, or his own sense of his 
fitness for it, has assigned to him. Thus one man tills the 
ground; another engages in manufacturing; a third gath¬ 
ers and distributes the produce of labor in its various 
forms; a fourth loans or exchanges money; a fifth makes 
or executes laws; and each of these persons, as he is con¬ 
tributing to the general good, is doing good as truly as the 
most devoted clergyman who labors in the cure of souls, 
or philanthropist who carries loaves of bread to hovels. 
To deny this, it has been well said, is to say that a commis¬ 
sariat or transport corps has nothing to do with carrying 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


809 


on a war, and that this business is discharged entirely by 
the men who stand in line of battle or mount the breach. 

The popular theory proceeds upon two assumptions, 
both of which are false; first, that the motives which urge 
men to diligence in their callings are mean and paltry,— 
that selfishness is the mainspring which causes all the 
wheels in the great machine of society to revolve; and, 
secondly, that pursuits which benefit those who prosecute 
them are necessarily selfish. The truth is, the best work, 
and a very large part of the work, done in every calling, 
is done not from a mean and sordid hunger for its emol¬ 
uments, whether of money, rank, or fame, but from a sin¬ 
cere love for it, and pride in performing its duties well 
and creditably. The moment a man begins to lose this 
esprit de corps, this high-minded professional pride, and 
to find his reward in his pay and not in his work, that 
moment his work begins to deteriorate, and he ceases to 
meet with the highest success. If pursuits which benefit 
those who follow them are necessarily selfish, then phil¬ 
anthropy itself is selfish, for its rewards, in popular esti¬ 
mation, are of the noblest kind. No sane man will 
depreciate the blessings that result from the labors of 
the Howards, the Frys, and the Nightingales; but they 
bear the same relation to the ordinary pursuits of life 
that medicine bears to food. Doctors and surgeons are 
useful members of society; but their services are less 
needed than those of butchers and bakers. Let the farmer 
cease to sow and reap, let the loom and the anvil be 
forsaken, and the courts of justice be closed, and not only 
will the philanthropist starve, but society will speedily 
become a den of robbers, if it does not utterly cease to 
exist. 


310 


words; their use and abuse. 


Mr. Mill notices an ambiguity in the word “ right,” 
which has been made the occasion of an ingenious sophism. 
A man asserts that he has a right to publish his opinions, 
which may be true in one sense, namely, that it would 
be wrong in any other person to hinder or prevent their 
publication; but it does not follow that, in publishing his 
opinions, he is doing right , for this is an entirely distinct 
proposition from the other. Its truth depends upon two 
things; first, whether he has taken due pains to ascertain 
that the opinions are true, and second, whether their 
publication in this manner, and at this time, will proba¬ 
bly be beneficial to the interests of truth on the whole. 
Another sophism, based on the ambiguity of the same 
word, is that of confounding a right of any kind with a 
right to enforce that right by resisting or punishing any 
violation of it, as in the case of a people whose right to 
good government is ignored by tyrannical rulers. The 
right or liberty of the people to turn out their rulers is 
so far from being the same thing as the other, that “ it 
depends upon an immense number of varying circum¬ 
stances, and is altogether one of the knottiest questions 
in practical ethics.” 

Montaigne complains with good reason that too many 
definitions, explanations, and replies to difficult questions, 
are purely verbal. “I demand what ‘nature’ is, what 
‘pleasure,’ ‘circle,’ and ‘substitution’ are? The question is 
about words, and is answer’d accordingly. A stone is a 
body; but if a man should further urge, and ‘ what is body?’ 
‘Substance;’ ‘and what is substance?’ and so on, he would 
drive the respondent to the end of his calepin. We ex¬ 
change one word for another, and ofttimes for one less 
understood. I better know what man is, than I know 


THE FALLACIES IN' WORDS. 


311 


what animal is, or mortal, or rational. To satisfie one 
doubt, they pop me in the mouth with three; ’tis the 
Hydra’s head.” * There was a time when it was said that 
the essence of gold and its substantial form consisted in 
its anreitij , and this explanation was supposed to answer 
all questions, and solve all doubts. 

From all this it will be seen that our words are, to a large 
extent, carelessly employed,— the signs of crude and indefi¬ 
nite generalizations. But even when the greatest care is 
taken in the employment of words, it is nearly impossible to 
choose and put them together so exquisitely that a sophist 
may not wrest and pervert their meaning. Those persons 
who have ever had a lawsuit need not be told how much 
ingenious argument may hang on a shade of meaning, to 
be determined objectively without reference to the fancied 
intentions of the legislator or the writer. Hardly a week 
passes, but a valuable bequest is successfully contested 
through some loophole of ambiguous phraseology. If, in 
ordinary life, words represent impressions and ideas, in 
legal instruments they are things ; they dispose of prop¬ 
erty, liberty, and life; they express the will of the law¬ 
giver, and become the masters of our social being. Yet 
so carelessly are they used by lawyers and legislators, 
that half the money spent in litigation goes to determine 
the meanings of words and phrases. O’Connell used to 
assert that he could drive a coach-and-six through an Act 
of Parliament. Many of our American enactments yawn 
with chasms wide enough for a whole railway train. But 
even when laws have been framed with the most consum¬ 
mate skill, the subtlety of a Choate or a Follett may twist 
what appears to be the clearest and most unmistakable 


♦“Essays,” Cotton's edition. 


312 


words; their use and abuse. 


language into a meaning the very opposite to that which 
the common sense of mankind would give it. 

I have heard Judge Story make the following state¬ 
ment to show the extreme difficulty of framing a statute 
so as to avoid all ambiguity in its language. Being once 
employed by Congress to draft an important law, he spent 
six months in trying to perfect its phraseology, so that its 
sense would be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, leaving 
not the smallest loophole for a lawyer to creep through. 
Yet, in less than a year, after having heard the arguments 
of two able attorneys, in a suit which came before him as 
a Judge of the United States Supreme Court, he was 
utterly at a loss to decide upon the statute’s meaning! 

A signal illustration of the ambiguity that lurks in the 
most familiar words, is furnished by a legal question that 
was fruitful of controversy and “ costs ” not long ago in 
England. An English nobleman, Lord Henry Seymour, 
who lived in Paris many years, executed a will in 1856, 
wherein he made a bequest of property worth seventy 
thousand pounds to the hospitals of London and Paris. 
No sooner was it known that he was dead, than the ques¬ 
tion was raised, “What does ‘London’ mean? Where are 
its limits, and what is its area? What does it contain, 
and what does it exclude?” Four groups of claimants 
appeared, each to some extent opposed by the other three. 
Group the first said, “ The gift is obviously confined to the 
City proper of London,”— that is, “ London within the 
walls,” comprising little more than half of a square mile. 
“Not so,” protested group the second; “it extends to all 
the hospitals within the old bills of mortality,”—that is, 
London, Westminster, Southwark, and about thirty out- 
parishes, but excluding Marylebone, St. Pancras, Padding- 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


313 


ton, Chelsea, and everything beyond. Group the third 
insisted that “ London ” included “ all the area within 
the metropolitan boroughs ”; while group the fourth, for 
cogent reasons of their own, were positive that the testator 
meant, and the true construction was, nothing less than 
the whole area included within the Registrar-General’s 
and the Census Commissioner’s interpretation of the word 
“ Metropolis.” The Master of the Rolls decided that the 
testator meant to use the word “ London ” in its full, com¬ 
plete, popular sense, as including all the busily occupied 
districts of what is usually called the Metropolis, as it 
existed in the year when the will was made. No sooner, 
however, was this vexed question settled, than another, 
hardly less puzzling, arose,— namely, What is a “ Hospi¬ 
tal”? Nearly every kind of charitable institution put in its 
claim; but it was finally decided that only such charities 
should share in the bequest as fell within the definition of 
the French word hospice used in the will. 

Another perplexing question which came before the 
English courts some years ago, and which not less vividly 
shows the importance of attention to the words we use, 
related to the meaning of the word “ team,” as used by 
writers generally, and used in a written agreement. A 
certain noble duke made an agreement with one of his 
tenants in Oxfordshire concerning the occupancy of a 
farm, and a portion of the agreement was couched in the 
following terms: “The tenant to perform each year for 

the Duke of -, at the rate of one day’s team-work, 

with two horses and one proper person, for every fifty 
pounds of rent, when required (except at hay or corn har¬ 
vest), without being paid for the same.” In other words, 
the rent of the farm was made up of two portions, the 



314 


words; their use and abuse. 


larger being a money payment, and the former a certain 
amount of farm service. All went on quietly and smoothly 
in reference to this agreement, until one particular day, 
when the duke’s agent or bailiff desired the farmer to send 
a cart to fetch coals from a railway station to the ducal 
mansion. “ Certainly not,” said the farmer. “ I’ll send 
the horses and a man, but you must find the cart.” 
“Pooh, pooh! what do you mean? Does not your agree¬ 
ment bind you to do team-w r ork occasionally for his Grace?” 
“Yes, and here’s the team; two horses and a careful man 
to drive them.” “ But there can’t be a team without a 
cart or wagon.” “ 0 yes, there can, the horses are the 
team.” “ No, the horses and cart together are the team.” 

The question which the court was called on to decide in 
the lawsuit which followed, was,—What is a “team”? The 
case w r as at first tried at Oxford, before a common jury, 
who gave a verdict substantially for the duke. A rule 
was afterward obtained, with a view to bring the question 
of definition before the judges at the Court of Queen’s 
Bench. The counsel for the duke contended that as team¬ 
work cannot be done by horses without a cart or wagon, it 
is obvious that a team must include a vehicle as well as the 
horses by which it was to be drawn. Mr. Justice A. said 
that, in the course of his reading, he had met with some 
lines which tend to show that the team is separate from 
the cart,— 

“Giles Jelt was sleeping, in his cart he lay; 

Some waggish pilf’rers stole his team away. 

Giles wakes and cries, ‘Ods Bodikins, what’s here? 

Why, how now; am I Giles or not? 

If he, I’ve lost six geldings to my smart; 

If not, Ods Bodikins, I’ve found a cart.’ ” 

Mr. Justice B. quoted a line from Words worth,- 

“My jolly team will work alone for me,” 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


315 


as proving the farmer’s interpretation, seeing that, though 
horses might possibly be jolly, a cart cannot. The counsel 
for His Grace urged that the dictionaries of Johnson and 
Walker both speak of a team as “a number of horses 
drawing the same carriage.” “True,” said Justice A. “do 
not these citations prove that the team and the carriage 
are distinct things?” “No,” replied the counsel on the 
duke’s side; “ because a team without a cart would be of 
no use.” He cited the description given by Caesar of the 
mode of fighting in chariots adopted by the ancient Britons, 
and of the particular use and meaning of the word tema- 
nem. From Caesar he came down to Gray, the English 
poet, and cited the lines,— 

“ Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, 

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe hath broke; 

How jocund did they drive their team afield, 

How bowed the wood beneath their sturdy stroke; ” 

and from Gray he came down to the far-famed “ Bull 
Run” affair in the recent American civil war, a graphic 
account of which told that “the teamsters cut the traces 
of the horses.” 

The counsel for the farmer, on the other hand, referred 
to Richardson’s English dictionary, and to Bosworth’s 
Anglo-Saxon dictionary, for support to the assertion that 
a team implies only the horses, not the vehicle also; and 
he then gave the following citations to the same effect: 
From Spenser,— 

“ Thee a ploughman all unmeeting found, 

As he his toilsome team that way did guide, 

And brought thee up a ploughman’s state to bide.” 

From Shakespeare,— 

“We fairies that do run, 

By the triple Hecat’s team, 

From the presence of the sun, 

Following darkness like a dream.” 


316 


words; their use and abuse. 


Again from Shakespeare,— 

“I am in love, but a team of horse shall 
Not pluck that from me, nor who ’tis I love.” 

From Dryden,— 

“He heaved with more than human force to move 
A weighty straw, the labor of a team.” 

Again from Dryden,— 

“Any number, passing in a line; 

Like a long team of snowy swans on high, 

Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky.” 

Spenser, Roscommon, Martineau, and other authorities, 
were also cited to the same purport, and all the light 
which English literature could throw upon the point was 
converged upon it. The learned judges were divided in 
their opinions, one deciding that the word “ team ” clearly 
implied the cart as well as the horses, two other judges 
deciding that it was enough if the farmer sent the horse 
and the driver to be put to such service as the duke’s 
agent might please. The arguments by which each sup¬ 
ported his conclusion were so acute, cogent, and weighty, 
that their disagreement seems to have been inevitable. 

The English historian, Hallam, says of the language of 
Hobbes that it is so lucid and concise that it would be 
almost as improper to put an algebraical process in differ¬ 
ent terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs. Hav¬ 
ing illustrated his precept by his practice, Hobbes speaks 
with peculiar authority on the importance of discrimina¬ 
tion in the use of words. In a memorable passage of 
the “ Leviathan,” from which we have already quoted, he 
says: “Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering 
of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise 
truth had need to remember what every name he useth 
stands for, and to place it accordingly; or else he will find 


THE FALLACIES IH WORDS. 


317 


himself entangled in words as a bird in limetwigs,— the 
more he struggles, the more belimed. Words are wise 
men’s counters,— they do but reckon by them; but they 
are the money of fools, that value them by the authority 
of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other doctor 
whatsoever.” Fuller quaintly suggests that the reason 
why the Schoolmen wrote in so bald a style was, “ that 
the vermin of equivocation might not hide themselves in 
the nap of their words.” The definition of words has been 
often regarded as a mere pedagogue’s exercise; but when 
we call to mind the persecutions, proscriptions, tortures, 
and even massacres, which have resulted from mistakes 
about the meaning of certain words, the office of the lexi¬ 
cographer assumes a grave and dignified aspect. It is not 
enough, however, in guarding against error, to discrimi¬ 
nate our words, so as to understand their exact force. We 
must also keep constantly in mind the fact that language, 
when used with the utmost precision, is at best but an 
imperfect representation of thought. Words are properly 
neither the “ names of things,” as modern writers have 
defined them, nor, as the ancients viewed them, the “pic¬ 
tures of ideas.” The most they can do is to express the 
relations of things; they are, as Hobbes said, “the signs 
of our conceptions,” serving as a mark to recall to our¬ 
selves the likeness of a former thought, and as a sign to 
make it known to others. 

Even as the signs of our conceptions, they are at best 
imperfect and unsatisfactory, representing only approxi¬ 
mately what we think, and never coordinating with the 
conceptions they are used to represent. “ Seizing on some 
characteristic mark of the conception, they always express 
too little or too much. They are sometimes distinctly 


318 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


metaphorical, sometimes indefinitely assertive; sometimes 
too concrete, sometimes too abstract.” Our sentences are 
not images of thought, reflected in a perfect mirror, nor 
photographs which lack coloring only; they are but the 
merest skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, tentative 
signs, which can put another only into a partial possession 
of our consciousness. To apprehend perfectly the thought 
of another man, even one who uses language with the 
utmost nicety and accuracy, we need to know his individu¬ 
ality, his entire past history; we must interpret and supple¬ 
ment his meaning by all that we know of his intellectual 
and moral constitution, his ways of thinking, feeling, and 
speaking; we must be en rapport with him; and even then 
we may fail to penetrate to the central meaning of his 
words, the very core of his thought. 

The soul of every man is a mystery which no other 
man can fathom; we are, as one has said, spirits in prison, 
able only to make signals to each other, but with a world 
of things to think and say which our signals cannot de¬ 
scribe at all. There is hardly an abstract term in any 
language which conveys precisely the same meaning to two 
different minds; every word is sure to awaken in one mind 
more or less different associations from those it awakens 
in another. Words mean the same thing only to persons 
who are psychologically the same, and who have had the 
same experiences. It is obvious that no word can explain 
any sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never 
felt the sensation. When Saunderson, who was born 
blind, tried to define “ red,” he compared that color to the 
blowing of a trumpet, or the crowing of a cock. In like 
manner Massieu, the deaf-mute, in trying to describe the 
sound of a trumpet, said that it was “ red.” The state- 


THE FALLACIES IU WORDS. 


319 


ment that words have to two persons a common meaning 
only when they suggest ideas of a common experience, is 
true even of the terms we stop to ponder; how much more 
true, then, of words whose full and exact meaning we no 
more pause to consider, than we reflect that the gold eagle 
which passes through our hands is a thousand cents. Try 
to ascertain the meaning of the most familiar words which 
are dropping from men’s lips, and you find that each has 
its history, and that many are an epitome of the thoughts 
and observations of ages. 

What two persons, for example, attach the same mean¬ 
ing to the words “democracy,” “conservatism,” “radical¬ 
ism,” “education”? What is the meaning of “gentle¬ 
man,” “comfortable,” “competence”? De Quincey says 
that he knew several persons in England with annual in¬ 
comes bordering on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke 
of themselves, and seemed seriously to think themselves, 
“ unhappy paupers.” Lady Hester Stanhope, with an 
income of two thousand seven hundred pounds a year, 
thought herself an absolute pauper in London, and went 
to live in the mountains of Syria; “for how, you know,” 
she would say pathetically, “ could the humblest of spin¬ 
sters live decently on that pittance?” Do the chaste and 
the licentious, the amiable and the revengeful, mean the 
same thing when they speak of “ love ” or “ hate ”? With 
what precious meaning are the words “ home ” and 
“ heaven ” flooded to some persons, and with what icy 
indifference are they heard by others ! 

So imperfect is language that it is doubtful whether 
such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the abso¬ 
lute truth of which can never be contested, is possible; for 
it can never be absolutely certain what is the meaning of 


320 


words; their use and abuse. 


the words in which the proposition is expressed, and the 
assertion that it is founded on partial observation, or that 
the words imperfectly express the observation on which it 
is founded, or are incomplete metaphors, or are defective 
in some other respect, must always be open to proof. 

Even words that designate outward, material objects, 
cognizable by the senses, do not always call up similar 
thoughts in different minds. The meaning they convey 
depends often upon the mental qualities of the hearer. 
Thus the word “ sun ” uttered to an unlettered man of 
feeble mental powers, conveys simply the idea of a ball 
of light and heat, which rises in the sky in the morning, 
and goes down at evening; but to the man of vivid imagi¬ 
nation, who is familiar with modern scientific discoveries, 
it suggests, more or less distinctly, all that science has 
revealed concerning that luminary. If w r e estimate words 
according to their etymological meaning, we shall still 
more clearly see how inadequate they are in themselves 
to involve the mass of facts which they connote,— as 
inadequate as is a thin and worthless bit of paper, which 
yet may represent a thousand pounds. In no case is the 
whole of an object expressed or characterized by its appel¬ 
lation, but only some salient feature or phenomenon is 
suggested, which is sometimes real, at others only appar¬ 
ent. Take the name of an animal, and it may probably 
express some trivial fact about its nose or its tail, as in 
“ rhinoceros ” we express nothing but the horn in its nose, 
and in “squirrel” we note only its shady tail; but each 
of these animals has other important characteristics, and 
other animals may have the very characteristics which 
these names import. The Latin word Homo means, ety¬ 
mologically, a creature made of earth, which is but 


THE FALLACIES IN WORDS. 


321 


metaphorically true; but for what an infinity, almost, of 
complex conceptions and relations does it stand! The San¬ 
skrit has four names for “ elephant,” from different petty 
characteristics of the animal, and yet how few of its qual¬ 
ities do they describe! “Take a w r ord expressive of the 
smallest possible modification of matter,— a word invented 
in the most expressive language in the world, and invented 
by no less eminent a philosopher than Democritus, and 
that, too, with great applause,— the word ‘atom,’ mean¬ 
ing that which cannot be cut. Yet simple as is the notion 
to be expressed, and great as were the resources at com¬ 
mand, what a failure the mere tvord is! It expresses too 
much and too little, too much as being applicable to other 
things, and consequently ambiguous; too little, because it 
does not express all the properties even of an atom. Its 
inadequacy cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the 
fact that its precise Latin equivalent is by us confined to 
the single acceptation ‘ insect’! ” * 

But if words are but imperfect symbols for designating 
material objects, how much more unequal must they be to 
the task of expressing that which lies above and behind 
matter and sensation, especially as all abstract terms are 
metaphors taken from sensible objects! How many feelings 
do we have, in the course of our lives, which beggar descrip¬ 
tion! How many apprehensions, limitations, distinctions, 
opinions are clearly present, at times, to our consciousness, 
which elude every attempt to give them verbal expression! 
Even the profoundest thinkers and the most accurate, hair¬ 
splitting writers, who weigh and test to the bottom every 
term they use, are baffled in the effort so to convey their 
conclusions as to defy all misapprehension or successful 


* “ Chapters on Language,'’ by F. W. Farrar. 


322 


words; their use and abuse. 


refutation. Beginning with definitions, they find that the 
definitions themselves need defining; and just at the tri¬ 
umphant moment when the structure of argument seems 
complete and logic-proof, some lynx-eyed adversary detects 
an inaccuracy or a contradiction in the use of some key¬ 
stone term, and the whole magnificent pile, so painfully 
reared, tumbles into ruins. 

The history of controversy, in short, in all ages and 
nations, is a history of disputes about words. The hardest 
problems, the keenest negotiations, the most momentous 
decisions, have turned on the meaning of a phrase, a term, 
or even a particle. A misapplied or sophistical expression 
has provoked the fiercest and most interminable quarrels. 
Misnomers have turned the tide of public opinion; verbal 
fallacies have filled men’s souls with prejudice, rage, and 
hate; and “the sparks of artful watchwords, thrown among 
combustible materials, have kindled the flames of deadly 
war and changed the destiny of empires.” 


CHAPTER XIII. 


NAMES OF MEN. 

“Imago animi, vultus, vitae, nomen est.” 

L’dtude des noms propres n’est point sans interSt pour la morale, l'organi- 
zation politique, la legislation, et l’histoire meme de la civilization.— Salverte. 

AMONG the crotchets of Sterne’s dialectician, Walter 
Shandy, was a theory regarding the importance of 
Christian names in determining the future behavior and 
destiny of the children to whom they are given. He sol¬ 
emnly maintained the opinion that there is a strange 
kind of magic bias which good or bad names, as he called 
them, irresistibly impress upon men’s character or con¬ 
duct. “ How many Caesars and Pompeys,” he would say, “ by 
mere inspiration of their names, have been rendered worthy 
of them? And how many there are,” he would add, “who 
might have done exceedingly well in the world, had not 
their characters and spirits been utterly depressed and Nic- 
odemused into nothing!” Of all the names in the universe 
the one to which the philosopher had the most unconquera¬ 
ble aversion was “ Tristram.” He would break off in the 
midst of one of his disputes on the subject of names, and 
demand of his antagonist whether he would say he had 
ever remembered, or whether he had ever heard tell of a 
man called “Tristram” performing anything great or worth 
recording. “ No,” he would say; “ Tristram! the thing is 
impossible.” 

In these observations of Mr. Shandy there may be some 

323 


324 


words; their use and abuse. 


exaggeration, but they contain substantial truth. The 
power of names in elevating or degrading both the things 
and persons to whom they are applied, is known to all 
thoughtful observers. Give to a conscious being a signifi¬ 
cant and graphic appellation, and it tends to make the 
character gravitate in the direction of the name. There 
are names that seem to act like promissory notes, which the 
bearer does all in his power to redeem at maturity; names 
that tend to verify themselves by swaying men toward the 
qualities they denote, while they too often lead to the ex¬ 
clusion of others no less important. It is difficult to say 
which is the greater misfortune, for a man to have a posi¬ 
tively mean name, or one that is grandiose. Lord Lytton, 
in “ Kenelm Chillingly,” speaking of the moral responsibil¬ 
ities of parents for the names they give their children, 
regards as equally to be deprecated the names which stamp 
a child with mediocrity, and those which stamp him with an 
impress of absurd and overweening ambition. Inflict upon 
a man, he says, the burden of a great name which he must 
utterly despair of equalling, and you crush him beneath 
the weight. If a poet were called John Milton, or William 
Shakespeare, he would not dare publish even a sonnet. On 
the other hand, call a child Peter Snooks or Lazarus Rust, 
and though he have the face and form of the god of the 
silver bow, and the eloquence of a Chatham, he will find it 
hard, if not impossible, to achieve distinction,— the name 
will be such a dead weight on his intellectual energies. 
Can Tabitha be a name to conjure with; can Jerusha be 
musical on the lips of love, or Higginbotham fill the trump 
of fame? Think of Washington having the name of Jenkins, 
and toasts being drunk to the immortal Jenkins, “first in 
war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country- 


4 


NAMES OF MEN. 


325 


men! ” The true choice of a name lies between extremes,— 
the two extremes of ludicrous insignificance and oppressive 
renown. It is questionable whether a good deal of the 
mediocrity of the reigning families in Europe is not due to 
the labyrinth of names in which the heir to a throne is hid¬ 
den at birth, like a moth in a silk cocoon. Some years ago 
an infant prince of Saxony was enveloped in sixteen names. 
About forty years ago the Queen of Naples gave birth to a 
princess whose names numbered thirty-two, or a dozen 
more than the names of Susan Brown, of whom we are told 
that 

“The patronymical name of the maid 
Was so completely overlaid 

With a long prenomical cover, 

That if each additional proper noun 
Was laid by the priest intensively down, 

Miss Susan was done uncommonly Brown, 

The moment the christening was over!” 

Think of an infant's being smothered for years in such a 
superfetation of names as that of the Neapolitan princess. 
It must require more mental energy than many babies can 
command, to break one’s way out of such a verbal palace 
prison as that. 

“Notre nom propre ,” says a French writer, “ c'est nous 
mSmes .” The name of a man instantly recalls him to 
recollection, with his physical and moral qualities, and the 
remarkable events, if any, in his career. The few syllables 
forming it “suffice to reopen the fountain of a bereaved 
mother’s tears; to cover with blushes the face of the 
maiden who believes her secret about to be revealed; to 
agitate the heart of the lover; to light up in the eyes of 
an enemy the fire of rage, and to awaken in the breast of 
one separated by distance from his friend the liveliest 
emotions of hope or regret.” What would history or biog- 


326 


words; their use and abuse. 


raphy be without proper names; or what stimulus would 
men have, inciting them to the performance of great 
and noble deeds, if they could not live a second life in their 
names? Among most nations the imposition of names has 
been esteemed of such moment, that it has been attended 
with religious rites. The Jews accompanied it with cir¬ 
cumcision; the Greeks and Romans with religious ceremo¬ 
nies and sacrifices; the Persians, after a religious service, 
chose at a venture from names written on slips of paper, 
and laid upon the Koran; while many Christians sanctify 
the rite by baptism. 

It is a well established fact that all proper names were 
originally significant, though in the lapse of years the 
meaning of many of them has been obscured or obliter¬ 
ated. Thus, the oldest known name, Adam, meant “red,” 
indicating that his body was fashioned from the red earth; 
while Moses signified “ drawn from the water.” So the 
fore-names of the Saxons were significant,— as Alfred, 
“all peace”; Biddulph, “the slayer of wolves”; Edmund, 
“truth-mouth,” or “the speaker of truth”; Edward, 
“truth-keeper”; Goddard, “honored of God.” It is said 
that Mr. Freeman, the English historian, has grown, in 
the course of his studies, so in love with the Old-English 
period, that he has named three of his children iElfred, 
Eadward, and iEthelburgh. According to Verstegan, Will¬ 
iam was a name not given to children, but a title of honor 
given for noble or worthy deeds. When a German had 
killed a Roman, the golden helmet of the vanquished sol¬ 
dier was placed upon his head, and the victor was honored 
with the title Gildhelm, or “golden helmet,”—in French, 
Guillaume. 

In the early ages of the world a single name sufficed 


NAMES OF MEN. 


327 


for each person. It was generally descriptive of some 
quality he had, or which his parents hoped he might in 
future have. In the course of time, to distinguish a man 
from others bearing the same appellative, a second name 
became necessary. The earliest approach to the modern 
system of nomenclature, was the addition of the name of 
a man’s son to his own name; as Caleb, the son of 
Jepliunneh, or Joshua, the son of Nun,— a practice which 
survives in our own day in such names as Adamson and 
Fitzherbert. The Romans, to mark the different gentes 
and familice , and to distinguish individuals of the same 
race, had three names,— the Prcenomen , the Nomen , and 
the Cognomen. The first denoted the individual; the sec¬ 
ond was the generic name, or term of clanship; and the 
third indicated the family. Military commanders, and 
other persons of the highest eminence, sometimes were 
honored with a fourth name, or Agnomen ; as Coriolanus, 
Africanus, Germanicus, borrowed from the name of a hos¬ 
tile country, which had been the scene of their exploits. 
A person was usually addressed only by his prgenomen, 
which, Horace tells us, “delicate ears loved”: 

“Gaudent prsenomine molles 
Auriculae.” 

Archdeacon Hare has well observed that by means of their 
names political principles, political duties, political affec¬ 
tions were impressed on the minds of the Romans from 
their birth. Every member of a great house had a deter¬ 
minate course marked out for him, the path in which his 
forefathers had trod; his name admonished him of what 
he owed to his country. “ Rien” says Desbrosses, “ n'a 
contribue davantage a la grandeur de la republique que cette 
methode de succession nominale, qui, incorporant , pour ainsi 


328 


words; their use and abuse. 


dire, a la gloire de Vet at, la gloire des noms he'reditaires , 
joignit le patriotisms de race au patriotisme national .” 

After the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the old 
Pagan names were commonly discarded, and Scriptural 
names, or names derived from church history, took their 
place. About the close of the tenth century, distinctive 
appellations, describing physical and moral qualities, hab¬ 
its, professions, etc., were added for the purpose of identi¬ 
fication; but as these sobriquets were imposed upon many 
who bore the same baptismal names, an entire change in 
the system of names became necessary, and hereditary 
surnames were adopted. These, it is said, were at first 
written, “ not in a direct line after the Christian name, 
but above it, between the lines,” and thus were literally 
supra nomina, or “ surnames.” 

Our English names, most of which have originated 
since the Norman Conquest, are borrowed, to some extent, 
from nearly all the races and languages of the earth. The 
Hebrew is represented in Ben, which means “ son,” and the 
Syriac in Bar, as in Barron and Bartholomew. The desire 
+ o disguise Old Testament names has shortened Abraham 
into “Braham,” and Moses into “Mosely” or “Moss.” In 
like manner Solomon becomes “ Sloman ”; Levi, “Lewis”; 
and Elias, “ Ellis.” 

The three most common patronymics of Celtic origin, 
now used by the English, are 0, Mac, and Ap. The High¬ 
landers of ScQtland employed the sire- name with Mac, and 
hence the Macdonalds and Mac Gregors, meaning “ the son 
of Donald ” and “ the son of Gregor.” The Irish used the 
prefix of Oy or 0, signifying grandson; as, O’Hara, 
O’Neale. They use the word Mac also; and the two 
names together are so essential notes of the Irish, that 


NAMES OF MEN. 


329 


‘‘Per Mac atque O, tu veros cognoscis Hibernos, 

His duobus ademptis, nullus Hibernus adest.” 

Mr. Lower, in his interesting work on personal names,* 
states that among the archives of the corporation of Gal¬ 
way, there is an order dated 1518, declaring that “ neither 
0 ne Mac shonlde strutte ne swagger through the streetes 
of Galway.” 

The old Normans prefixed to their names the word Fitz 
a corruption of fils , derived from the Latin filius ; as Fitz- 
William, “ the son of William.” Camden states that there 
is not a village in Normandy that has not surnamed some 
family in England. The French names thus introduced 
from Normandy may generally be known by the prefixes 
De , Dii, De la, St., and by the suffixes Font, Beau , Age, Mont, 
Bois, Champ, Ville, etc., most of which are parts of the 
proper names of places; as De Mortimer, St. Maure (Sey¬ 
mour), Montfort, etc. The Russian peasantry employ the 
termination witz, and the Poles shy in the same sense; as 
Peter Paulowitz, “Peter, the son of Paul,” and James 
Petrowsky, “ James, the son of Peter.” 

In Wales, till a late period, no surnames were used? 
except Ap, or Son; as Ap Richard, now corrupted into 
Prichard; Ap Owen, now Bowen; Ap Roderick, now Brod¬ 
erick and Brodie. Not over a century has passed since 
one might have heard in Wales of such “ yard-long-tailed ” 
combinations as Evan-ap-Griffith-ap-David-ap Jenken, and 
so on to the seventh or eighth generation, the individual 
carrying his pedigree in his name. * To ridicule this 
absurd species of nomenclature, a wag of the seventeenth 
century described cheese as being 

*“An Essay on English Surnames,” by Mark Antony Lower, M.A., 
F.S.A., a work full of interesting information on the subject of which it treats, 
and to which I am much indebted. 


330 


words; their use and abuse. 


“Adam’s own cousin-german by its birth, 

Ap-Curds-ap-Milk-ap-Cow-ap-Grass-ap-Earth!” 

Mr. Lower says that the following anecdote was related to 
him by a native of Wales: An Englishman riding one 
dark night among the mountains, heard a cry of distress, 
uttered apparently by a man who had fallen into a ravine 
near the highway, and, on listening more attentively, 
heard the words: “Help, master, help!” in a voice truly 
Cambrian. “Help! what, who are you?” inquired the 
traveller. “ Jenkin - ap - Griffith - ap- Robin - ap - William - ap- 
Rees-ap-Evan,” was the reply. “ Lazy fellows that ye be,” 
rejoined the Englishman, putting spurs to his horse, “ to 
lie rolling in that hole, half a dozen of ye; why, in the 
name of common sense, don’t ye help one another out?” 

In the twelfth century it was considered a mark of dis¬ 
grace to have no surname. A wealthy heiress is repre¬ 
sented as saying in respect to her suitor, Robert, natural 
son of King Henry I, who had but one name: 

“It were to me a great shame, 

To have a lord withouten his twa name;” 

whereupon the King, to remedy the fatal defect, gave him 
the surname of Fitz-Roy. 

The early Saxons had as a rule but one name, which 
was always significant of some outward or other peculiarity, 
and was doubtless often given to children with the belief 
or hope that the meaning of the word might exert some 
mysterious influence on the bearer’s future destiny. Ere 
long, however, surnames came into fashion with them, too, 
and were derived from the endless variety of personal 
qualities, natural objects, occupations and pursuits, social 
relations, localities, offices, and even from different parts of 
the body (as Cheek, Beard, Shanks), from sports (as Ball, 


NAMES OF MEN. 


331 


Bowles, Whist, Fairplay), from measures (as Gill, Peck), 
and from diseases (as Cramp, Toothacher, Akenside), from a 
conjunction (as And), and from coins (as Penny, Twopenny, 
Moneypenny, Grote, Pound). On a person with the first of 
these pecuniary names, the following epitaph was written: 

“Reader, if cash thou art in want of any, 

Dig four feet deep, and thou shalt find a Penny.” 

The prefix atte or at softened to a or an has helped to 
form many names. A man living on a moor would call 
himself Attemoor or Atmoor; if near a gate, Attegate or 
Agate. John Atten Oak was oftentimes condensed into 
John-a-Noke, and then into John Noaks. Nye is thus a 
corruption of Atten-Eye, “ at the island.” From Apple- 
garth, “ an orchard,” are derived Applegate and Appleton. 
Beckett means literally “a little brook”; Chase, “a for¬ 
est”; Cobb, “a harbor”; Craig, “a rock” or “precipice”; 
Holme and Holmes, “a meadow surrounded with water”; 
Holt, “a grove”; Holloway, “ a deep road between high 
banks”; Lee and Leigh, “a pasture”; Peel, “a pool”; 
Slack, “ low ground,” or “ a pass between mountains.” The 
root of the ubiquitous Smith is smitan , “ to smite,” and like 
the Latin faber, the name was originally given to all “ smit- 
ers,” whether workers in wood or workers in metal. Soldiers 
were sometimes called War-Smiths. Among all the forty 
thousand English surnames, no one has been more prolific 
of jests and witticisms, especially John Smith, which, from 
its commonness, is practically no name, though the rural 
Englishman seems to have thought otherwise, who directed 
a letter, “For Mr. John Smith, London,— with spead.” 
As there are hundreds of John Smiths in the London 
Directory, the letter might as well have been addressed to 
the Man in the Moon. There is a well known story of a 


332 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


wag at a crowded theatre, who secured a seat by shouting 
“ Mr. Smith’s house is on fire!” 

Many words obsolete in English are preserved in sur¬ 
names; as Sutor, which is the Latin and Saxon for “shoe¬ 
maker;” Latimer, from Latiner, “a writer of Latin;” 
Chaucer, from chausier , “a hose-maker”; Lorimer, “a 
maker of spurs, and bits for bridles.” An Arkwright was 
“a maker of meal-chests”; Lander is from lavandier , “a 
washerwoman”; Banister, is “a keeper of the Bath”; 
Crocker, “ a potter”; Shearman, “one who shears worsteds, 
etc.”; Sanger, “a singer”; Notman, “a cowherd.” Gener¬ 
ally all names ending in er indicate some employment or 
profession. Such names as Baxter and Brewster are the 
feminine of Baker and Brewer, as is Webster of Webber, or 
“ weaver,” which shows that these trades were anciently 
carried on by women, and that when men began to follow 
them, they retained for some time the feminine names, as do 
men-milliners now. The name of the poet Whittier, how¬ 
ever, is a corruption of “ White church.” The termination 
ward indicates “a keeper”; as Hayward, “ keeper of the 
town cattle”; Woodward, “forest-keeper.” Rush ^“sub¬ 
tle”; Bonner, “kind”; Eldridge, “ wild,” “ghastly.” Nu¬ 
merous surnames are derived from the chase, showing the 
passion of the early English for field-sports; as Bowyer, 
Fowler, Fletcher (from the French flbche, an arrow), Hart¬ 
man. Tod is the Scotch word for fox ; hence Todhunter 
(the name of a celebrated mathematician who died recently 
at Cambridge, Eng.) is “ a fox-hunter.” Among the names 
derived from offices are Chalmers, “a chamberlain;” Fos¬ 
ter, “a nourisher,” one who had care of the children of 
great men; and Franklin, a person next in dignity to an 
esquire. Palmer comes from the professional wanderer of 


NAMES OF MEN. 


333 


the ancient time, who always carried a palm -branch as a 
pledge of his having visited the Holy Land. Landseer was 
a “land-steward,” or bailiff. 

Some names, denoting mean occupations which only 
bondmen would follow, have been disguised by a new or¬ 
thography, “ mollified ridiculously,” as Camden says, “ lest 
their bearers should seem vilified by them.” Carter, Tailor, 
and Smith have been metamorphosed into Carteer, Tayleure, 
Smyth, Smeeth, or Smythe. Mr. Hayward, ashamed of 
being called “ cattle-keeper,” has transformed himself into 
Howard, as if he hoped to smuggle himself among the con¬ 
nections of the greatest of ducal houses. Dean Swift, speak¬ 
ing of these devices to change the vulgar into the genteel 
by the change of a letter, says: “ I know a citizen who adds 
or alters a letter in his name with every plum he acquires; 
he now wants only the change of a vowel to be allied to a 
sovereign prince, Farnese, in Italy, and that perhaps he may 
contrive to be done by a mistake of the graver upon his 
tombstone.” Mr. Lower tells a good story of a Tailor who 
had been thus dignified, and who haughtily demanded of a 
farmer the name of his dog. The answer was: “ Why, sir, 
his proper name is Jowler, but since lie’s a consequential 
kind of puppy, we calls him Jowleure! ” 

Of the Saxon patronymics the most fruitful is son , with 
which is mingled inseparably the genitive letter s. Thus 
from the Christian name Adam are derived Adams, Adam¬ 
son, Addison; from Andrew , Andrews, Anderson; from 
Dennis, Dennison, Jennison; from Henry, Henrison, Harris, 
Harrison, Hawes, Hawkins; from John, Johns, Jones, Jon- 
son, Johnson, Jennings, Jenks, Jenkinson, Jackson, Jockins; 
from William, Williamson, Williams, Wilson, Wills, Wil¬ 
kins, Wilkinson, Wells; from Walter , Watson, Watts, 


334 


words; their use and abuse. 


Watkins. From the Old Saxon derivation ing, signifying 
offspring, it is said that we get over two thousand proper 
names. Browning and Whiting are dark and white off¬ 
spring. The termination kin , derived from the ancient cyn, 
meaning “race,” is found in a yet greater number of 
names; while from the termination ock (as in Pollock, 
from Paul, and contracted into Polk) are obtained compar¬ 
atively few names. Scandinavian mythology has contrib¬ 
uted a few names to our English list. From Thor we have 
Thoresby, Thursby, and Thurlow. 

Among the surnames derived from personal qualities, 
we have Russell, “ redGough, also “ red Snell, “agile ” 
or “ hardy ”; Read, Reid, or Reed, an old spelling of “ red ”; 
Duff, “black”; Vaughan, “little”; Longfellow, Moody, 
Goodenough, Toogood, and hundreds of others. Farebrother 
is a Scottish name for “ uncle”; Waller means a “ pilgrim,” 
or “ stranger.” Of Puritan surnames derived from the vir¬ 
tues, Be-courteous Cole, Search-the-Scriptures Moreton, 
Fly-fornication Richardson, Kill-sin Pemble, Figlit-the- 
good-fight-of-faith White, are examples. Surnames have 
even been derived from oaths, and other such exclamations. 
Profane swearing was a common vice in the early times, 
and when men habitually interlarded their conversations 
with oaths, they became sobriquets by which they were 
known. Just as Say-Say became the title of an old gentle¬ 
man who always began a remark with “ I say-say, old boy,” 
so a profane exclamation, repeatedly uttered, became a 
proper name. Godkin, Blood, and Sacrd are said to be 
clipped oaths. Parsal] is corrupted from Par del, “ By 
Heaven,” Pardoe from Par Dieu, and Godsall and Godbody 
from “ By the soul and body of God!” the shocking but 
favorite oath of Edward III. 


NAMES OF MEN. 


335 


There are names which in the social circle will provoke 
a smile, in spite of every attempt to preserve one’s gravity; 
others that excite horror, hate, or contempt; and others 
which, inviting cheap pnns and gibes, irritate the minds 
of the calmest men. Shenstone thanked God that his name 
was not liable to a pun. There is a large class of names 
indicative of personal blemishes or moral obliquities, such 
as Asse, Goose, Lazy, Leatherhead, Addlehead, Milksop, 
Mudd, Pighead, Trollope, Hussey, Silliman, Cruickshank, 
Blackmonster, etc. In many countries Devil is a surname. 
Kennard, once Kaynard, means “ you dog,” also a “ rascal.” 
The Romans had their Plauti, Pandi, Vari, and Scauri, 
that is, the Splay-foots, the Bandy-legs, the In-knees, and 
the Club-foots. Codes means “ one-eyed”; Flaccus, one of 
the names of Horace, “flap-eared”; and Naso points to a 
long “ nose.” Csesar, from whose name come the German 
Kaiser and the Russian Czar , was so called (or, at least, the 
first Roman with the name was so called) from his coming 
into the world with long hair ( ccesaries ), or from his un¬ 
natural mode of birth (a c^eso matris utero). Who would 
introduce Mr. Shakelady into the circle of his friends, and 
what worthy deeds could be expected from a Doolittle? 
Who can blame Dr. Jacob Quackenboss for dropping a 
couple of syllables and the quack at the same time from 
his name, and becoming Jacob Bush, M.D.? Who can help 
sympathizing with Mr. Death, who asked the Legislature of 
Massachusetts to change his name to one less sepulchral; 
or with Mr. Wormwood, who petitioned for liberty to 
assume the name of Washington, declaring that the intense 
sufferings of so many years of wormwood existence deserved 
the compensation of a great and glorious name? Louis 
XI was less justified in changing the name of his barber, 


336 words; their use and abuse. 

Olivier le Diable, into Olivier le Mauvais, then to Olivier le 
Malin, and then into Olivier le Daim, at the same time for¬ 
bidding his former names ever to be mentioned. On the other 
hand, the ill-omened name of Maria Theresa’s noble min¬ 
ister, Thunichtgut, “ Do-no-good,” was rightfully changed 
by the Empress into Thugut, “Do-good.” The original 
name of the great French writer, Balzac, was Guez, “a 
beggar.” Men who inherit names originally given in 
contempt and scorn have this compensation, that, as many 
a hump-backed and ugly-looking man has found in his 
deformity “ a perpetual spur to rescue and deliver him 
from scorn,” so the inheritors of mean or degrading names 
are provoked and stimulated, as we see in the case of 
Brutus, “ stupid,” to redeem them from their degradation 
by noble deeds, and make them for centuries the watch¬ 
words of humanity. 

The dislike to vulgar and cacophonous names led some 
scholars and others, at an early period, to adopt Greek or 
Latin forms. The native name of Erasmus was Gheraerd 
Gheraerds. The root of Gheraerd is a verb meaning “to 
desire,” and so the great scholar Latinized his Christian 
name into Desiderius, and Graecized his surname into Eras¬ 
mus, both signifying the same thing. The name of Luther’s 
friend, the celebrated theologian and reformer, Melanch- 
thon, is a translation of the German Schwarzerde, or 
“ Black Earth.” 

Considering the great variety of English proper names,— 
representing, as they do, nearly all the nationalities of 
Europe,— it is not strange that they have suffered much 
from corruption. The causes of this corruption have been 
the wear and tear of time and usage; the repetition of 
foreign sounds by alien lips; the falling of those sounds 


NAMES OF MEN. 


337 


upon a dull or deafened ear; tlieir disguisement by too 
thick or too thin an utterance; incorrect spelling; the 
practice of pronouncing the words as they were written; 
and the fluctuations of orthography. Many Norman names 
have been so mutilated, that their owners, if they could 
see them, would find them unintelligible. Thus we have 
Darcy from Adrecy, Boswell from Bosseville, Loring from 
Lorraine, and Taille-bois has been changed into Tallboys! 
Paganus became first Painim, and then Payne. But the 
most unhappy victims of this corrupting tendency were 
four Normans, whose names were anglicized from honor¬ 
able into the most ill-omened and repulsive appellations. 
One, called De-Ath, became Death; another, De-Ville, was 
transformed into a Devil; and the third, Scardeville, is now 
Skarfield, and — horresco ref evens — Scaredevil! 

It is natural to suppose that all families bearing English 
names are of English extraction; but there are examples 
of the contrary. The descendant of a German family, 
whose name in the Old World was Briickenbauer, calls 
himself in this country Bridgebuilder. A German called 
Feuerstein (“firestone,” or “flint”), having settled among a 
French population in the West, changed his name to 
Pierre a Fusil; but, the Anglo-American population be¬ 
coming after a while the leading one, Pierre & Fusil was 
transformed into the pithy Peter Gun! 

Mr. Lower gives an interesting account of the origin of 
certain famous historical names. The name of Fortescue 
was bestowed on Sir Richard le Forte, a leader in the 
Conqueror’s army, because he protected his chief at the 
battle of Hastings by bearing before him a massive escu, 
or shield. The name of Lockhart was originally given to 
a follower of Lord Douglas, who accompanied him to the 


338 


words; their use and abuse. 


Holy Land with the heart of King Robert Bruce. Hence 
some of the family bear a padlock enclosing a heart in 
their arms. The illustrious surname of Plantagenet, borne 
by eight kings of England, originally belonged to Fulke, 
the Count of Anjou, in the twelfth century. To expiate 
certain flagrant crimes of which he had been guilty, he 
went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and wore in his cap, 
as a mark of humility, a planta genista, or “broom-plant,” 
and hence was surnamed Plantagenet. Another version 
of the story is that he suffered himself to be beaten with 
“ broom-twigs,” plantagananslce. The Scottish name, Turn- 
bull, is said to have been given to a strong man, one 
Ruel, who “turned” by the head, a wild “bull” which ran 
violently against King Robert Bruce in Stirling Park. 
The celebrated and numerous Scottish famity of Arm¬ 
strong derive their surname from an ancestor who was 
an armor-bearer, and by whom an ancient King of Scot¬ 
land was remounted, after his horse had been killed under 
him in battle. The Halidays were named from their 
war cry, “A holy day”; every day being holy, in their 
estimation, that was spent in ravaging the enemy’s coun¬ 
try. A poor child, picked up at Newark-upon-Trent, was 
called by the inhabitants Tom Among Us. Becoming 
eminent, he was employed in several embassies, and 
changed his name to the dignified one of Dr. Thomas 
Magnus. Though the earliest names were short and 
simple, yet there appears to have prevailed, even in the 
olden times, a taste for long and sounding names. In a 
note to Coleridge’s “Literary Biography,” mention is made 
of an author whose name is of fearful length,— Abul 
Waled Mohammed Ebn Ashmed Ebn Mohammed Ebn Ras- 
chid. Think of the time wasted in speaking and writing 


NAMES OF MEN. 


339 


such an appellation, which, unless he was blessed with a 
very tenacious memory, its owner himself must have been 
sometimes puzzled to recollect! The polytitled Arab, 
whose name thus “drags, like a wounded snake, its slow 
length along,” was born at Corinth about 1150, and died in 
Morocco in 1206. The Spaniards have been noted, beyond 
all other peoples, for a passion for voluminous and digni¬ 
fied names; and to enlarge them, they often add their 
places of residence. This is amusingly illustrated by a 
story told by Fuller in his “Worthies.” A rich citizen, of 
the name of John Cuts, was ordered by Queen Elizabeth 
to receive and entertain the Spanish ambassador; but the 
don was greatly displeased, feeling that he was disparaged 
by being placed with a man whose name was so ridicu¬ 
lously short, and who, consequently, could never have 
achieved anything great or honorable; but when he 
found that the hospitality of his host had nothing mono¬ 
syllabic about it, but more than made up for the brevity 
of his name, he was reconciled. Lucian tells of one 
Simon, who, coming to a considerable fortune, aggran¬ 
dized his name to Simonides. Diodes, becoming emperor, 
lengthened his name to Dioclesian; and Bruna, Queen of 
France, tried to give regal pomp to her name by trans¬ 
forming it to Brunehault. 

Oddities, eccentricities, and happy accidents of names 
are common to all languages, and open a wide field of 
playful speculation and research. What queer yet felici¬ 
tous conjunctions are Preserved Fish, Virginia Weed, 
Dunn Browne, Mahogany Coffin, and Return Swift? Es¬ 
pecially remarkable is the extent to which the occupations 
of men harmonize with their surnames. In London, Gin 
& Ginman, and Alehouse are publicans. Portwine and 


340 


words; their use and abuse. 


Negus are licensed victuallers, one in Westminster, the 
other in Bishopsgate street. Seaman is the host of the 
Ship Hotel, and A. King keeps the Crown and Sceptre. 
Pye is a pastry cook, and Fitall and Treadaway are shoe¬ 
makers. Mr. Weinmann sells sherries, madeiras, etc., in 
Chicago, and Mr. Silverman is a noted hanker. It is a 
striking fact that Mr. Loud and Mr. Thunder were, some 
years ago, both organists in the same American town; and 
we must acknowledge that few names could harmonize 
better, or accord more happily with the double diapason 
and the swell to which their professional duties accus¬ 
tomed them. What name could be more picturesque for 
a pot-boy than Corker, for a dentist than Tugwell, or for 
an editor of “Punch” than Mark Lemon? What hap¬ 
pier appellation for the owner of a line of stage coaches 
than Jehu Golightly, the name of a southern proprietor, 
which the incredulous passenger refused to believe acci¬ 
dental ? 

Sometimes the name harmonizes ill with, or is posi¬ 
tively antagonistic to, the occupation or character. The 
amiable and witty banker-poet, Horace Smith, even 
declares that “surnames ever go by contraries,” and, as 
proof, says: 

“Mr. Barker’s as mute as a fish in the sea, 

Mr. Miles never moves on a journey, 

Mr. Go-to-bed sits up till half-past three, 

Mr. Makepeace was bred an attorney. 

Mr. Gardener can’t tell a flower from a root, 

Mr. Wild with timidity draws back; 

Mr. Rider performs all his travels on foot, 

Mr. Foote all his journeys on horseback.” 

Ward and Lock, who should sell bank safes, are book 
publishers. Neal and Pray was the title of a house in 
New England, that was by no means given to devotion. 


NAMES OF MEN. 


341 


Butcher, Death, Slaughter, Churchyard, and Coffin were 
the names of so many London surgeons and apothecaries. 
Partnerships often show a curious conjunction of names; as 
Lamb & Hare, Holland & Sherry, Carpenter & Wood, Spin- 
age & Lamb, Flint & Steel, Foot & Stocking, hosiers, 
Rumfit & Cutwell, tailors, Robb & Steel, and, above all, I. 
Ketchum & U. Cheatham, the immortal names of two New 
York brokers. Not only business but hymeneal partner¬ 
ships reveal some singular combinations; as when Mr. 
Good marries Miss Evil, when George Virtue is united to 
Susan Vice, and when Benjamin Bird, aged sixty, is wedded 
to Julia Chaff, aged twenty, showing that, in spite of the 
old saw, “ an old bird ” may be “ caught by chaff.” 

Punning upon names has always been a favorite amuse¬ 
ment with those 


“Who think it legitimate fun 
To be blazing away at every one 
With a regular double-loaded gun.” 

When the defender of a certain extortioner, whom Lutatius 
Catulus accused, attempted by a sarcasm to disconcert his 
vehement adversary, saying, “ Why do you bark, little 
dog?” (“ Quid latras, Catule ?") “Because I saw a thief,” 
retorted Catulus. Shakespeare makes Falstaff play upon 
his swaggering ancient’s name, telling Pistol he will double 
charge him with sack, or dismissing him with—“No more, 
Pistol; I would not have you go off here; discharge your¬ 
self of our company, Pistol.” When a man named Silver 
was arraigned before Sir Thomas More, he said: “ Silver , 
you must be tried by fire." “ Yes,” replied the prisoner, 
“ but you know, my lord, that Quick Silver cannot abide 
the fire.” The man’s wit procured his discharge. An old 
gentleman by the name of Gould, having married a very 


342 


words; their use and abuse. 


young wife, wrote to a friend informing him of his good 
fortune, concluding with 

“So you see, my dear sir, though I’m eighty years old 
A girl of eighteen is in love with old Gould.” 

To this his friend replied: 

“A girl of eighteen may love, it is true, 

But believe me, dear sir, it is Gold without U.” 

When a Bishop Goodenough was appointed to his office, 
a certain dignitary who had hoped, but failed, to get the 
appointment, was asked the secret of his disappointment, 
and replied: “Because I was not Goodenough.” 

Fuller, in his “ Grave Thoughts,” tells an anecdote 
which shows that where the punning propensity exists, 
no occasion or subject, however solemn, will prevent it 
from finding expression: “ When worthy Master Hern, 
famous for his living, preaching, and writing, lay on his 
deathbed (rich only in goodness and children), his wife 
made such womanish lamentations, what should become 
of her little ones? ‘Peace! sweet-heart,’ said he; ‘that God 
who feedeth the ravens will not starve the herns;’ a speech 
censured as light by some, observed by others as prophet¬ 
ical; as indeed it came to pass that they were all well 
disposed of.” It is said that John Huss, when burning at 
the stake, fixed his eyes steadfastly upon the spectators, 
and said with much solemnity: “They burn a goose , but 
in a hundred years a swan will arise out of the ashes;” 
words which many years afterward were regarded as 
predicting the great Protestant reformer,— Huss signifying 
“a goose,” and Luther, “a swan.” 

There are occasions, however, when, as Sir William 
F. Napier once wrote to a friend, in excusing himself for 
making some bad puns, “a bitter feeling turns to humor 


NAMES OE MEN. 


343 


to avoid cursing; ” and it is certain that it was from no 
desire to display his wit, that Aeschylus devoted twelve 
lines of “a splendid and passionate chorus” to a denun¬ 
ciation of 

“Sweet Helen, 

Hell in her name, but Heaven in her looks.” 

Even Dr. Johnson, a professed hater of puns, could not 
resist the temptation, when introduced to Mrs. Barbauld, 
of growling, “ Bare-bald! why, that’s the very pleonasm of 
baldness! ” 

At the beginning of this chapter some remarks were 
made on the names of children, and with a few words 
further on the same theme I will end. Too often the boy 
or girl is named after the father or mother, taking the 
names, however ugly, ill-sounding, or uneuphonious, that 
have been handed down in the family from generation to 
generation, without a thought of the cruelty inflicted on the 
unconscious babe by fastening Ebenezer or Tabitha on it 
for life. Where this folly is avoided by parents, they often 
outrage their sons by baptizing them George Washington, 
Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Andrew Jackson, 
or worse still, loading them with classical names, like those 
of which Ex-President Grant is a conspicuous victim. The 
whims, freaks, and eccentricities which dictate the names of 
children are as inexplicable as they are multifarious. At a 
United States census some years ago, record was obtained 
of a man who had named his five children Imprimis, 
Finis, Appendix, Addendum, and Erratum. It has been 
suggested that had there been a sixth, he would probably 
have been Supplement. Everybody is familiar with the 
story of a worthy lady, who, having named four sons 
successively Matthew, Mark. Luke, and John, insisted on 


344 


words; their use and abuse. 


calling the fifth Acts,—a perversity equalled by that of 
the father of ten children, who, having been blessed with 
three more, named them Moreover, Nevertheless, and 
Notwithstanding. No doubt these last appellatives are 
mythical; but it is positively certain that names are often 
given to children, which, being utterly incongruous with 
their looks, descent, or character, rendering them targets 
for coarse jests, or raising expectations that are sure to 
be falsified, are productive to their bearers, if they are 
at all sensitive, of an incalculable amount of suffering. 
In naming a child his individuality should, first of all, be 
recognized. Instead of being invested with the cast-off 
appellation of some dead ancestor, as musty as the clothes 
he wore,— a ghostly index-finger forever pointing to the 
past,— he should have a fresh name, free from all ridicu¬ 
lous or unpleasant associations, congruous with his proba¬ 
ble destiny, and suggestive of a history to be filled, a life 
of usefulness to be lived. If such a name cannot be in¬ 
vented, let him bear the plain, honest one of John, Edward, 
or Robert, which affords no opportunity for gibes, and 
consequent heart-burnings, promises nothing, disappoints 
nobody, and yet may be transfigured and glorified by the 
noblest and most illustrious deeds. 


CHAPTER XIV. 


NICKNAMES. 


The word “nick” in nickname is cognate with the German word necken , to 
mock, to quiz, and the English word “nag,” to tease, or provoke.—W. L. 
Blackley, Word- Gossip. 

A good name will wear out, a bad one may be turned; a nickname lasts 
forever.—Z immerman. 

J’ai et 6 toujours e tonne que les Families qui portent un Nom odieux ou 
ridicule, ne le qnittent pas.— Bayle. 



MONG the books that need to be written, one of the 


most instructive would be a treatise on the history 
and influence of nicknames. Philosophers who study the 
great events in the world’s history, are too apt, in their 
eagerness to discover adequate causes, to overlook the 
apparently trifling means by which mankind are influ¬ 
enced. The}^ are eloquent enough upon the dawning of 
a new idea in the world, when its effects are set forth in 
all the pomp of elaborate histories and disquisitions; but 
they would do a greater service by showing how and 
when, by being condensed into a pithy word or phrase, it 
wins the acceptance of mankind. The influence of songs 
upon a people in times of excitement and revolution is 
familiar to all. “ When the French mob began to sing 
the Marseillaise, they had evidently caught the spirit of 
the revolution; and what a song is to a political essay, 
a nickname is to a song.” In itself such a means of 
influence may seem trivial; and yet history shows that 
it is no easy thing to estimate the force of these ingenious 
appellations. 


345 


346 


words; their use and abuse. 


The name of a man is not a mere label, which may be 
detached, as one detaches a label from a piece of lifeless 
furniture. As Goethe once feelingly said, it is not like 
a cloak, which only hangs about a man, and at which one 
may at any rate be allowed to pull and twitch; but it is 
a close-fitting garment, which has grown over and over 
him, like his skin, and which one cannot scrape and flay 
without injuring himself. Names not only represent cer¬ 
tain facts or thoughts, but they powerfully mould the 
facts and thoughts which they represent. Men have borne 
names which they have felt to be stigmas, an active cause 
of discouragement and failure to their dying day; and 
they have borne names, inherited from their ancestors, 
which have lifted them above themselves, by bringing 
them into fellowship with a past of high effort or generous 
sacrifice. 

In politics, it has long been observed that no orator 
can compare for a moment in effect with him who can 
give apt and telling nicknames. Brevity is the soul of 
wit, and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise 
and irresistible. It is a terse, pointed, short-hand mode 
of reasoning, condensing a volume of meaning into an 
epithet, and is especially popular in these days of steam 
and electric telegraphs, because it saves the trouble of 
thinking. There is a deep instinct in man which prompts 
him, when engaged in any controversy, whether of tongue 
or pen, to assume to himself some honorable name which 
begs the whole matter in dispute, and at the same time 
to fasten on his adversary a name which shall render him 
ridiculous, odious, or contemptible. By facts and logic 
you may command the assent of the few; but by nick¬ 
names you may enlist the passions of the million on your 


NICKNAMES. 


347 


side. Who can doubt that when, in the English civil 
wars, the parliamentary party styled themselves “ the 
Godly” and their opponents “the Malignants,” the ques¬ 
tion at issue, wherever entrance could be gained for these 
words, was already decided? Who can estimate how much 
the Whig party in this country was damaged by the 
derisive sarcasm, “ All the decency,” or its opponents by 
the appellation of “ Locofocos”? Is it not certain that the 
odious name “Copperheads,” which was so early in our 
late civil war affixed to the northern sympathizers with 
the South, had an incalculable influence in gagging them, 
and in preventing their numbers from multiplying? 

It has been truly said that in the distracted times of 
early revolution, any nickname, however vague, will fully 
answer a purpose, though neither those who are blackened 
by the odium, nor those who cast it, can define the hateful 
appellative. The historian Hume says that when the term 
“Delinquents” came into vogue in England, it expressed 
a degree and species of guilt not easily known or ascer¬ 
tained. It served, however, the end of those revolution¬ 
ists who had coined it, by involving any person in, or 
coloring any action by, “delinquency”; and many of the 
nobility and gentry were, without any questions being 
asked, suddenly discovered to have committed the crime of 
“ delinquency.” The degree in which the political opinions 
of our countrymen were influenced, and their feelings 
embittered, some forty years ago, by the appellation 
“Federalist,” cannot be easily estimated. The fact that 
many who heard the derisive title knew not its origin, 
and some not even its meaning, did not lessen its influence, 
— as an incident related by Judge Gaston of North Caro¬ 
lina well illustrates. In travelling on his circuit through 


348 words; TfiEiR use and abuse. 

the backwoods of that state, he learned that the people of 
a certain town had elected a Democrat, in place of a Whig, 
to serve them in the legislature. When asked the reason 
of this change, his informant, an honest, rough-looking 
citizen, replied: “Oh, we didn’t reelect Mr: A, because he 
is a fetheral." “A fetheral!” exclaimed the judge, “what is 
a fetheral?” “I don’t know,” was the reply, “but it ain't 
a human." 

There is no man so insignificant that he may not blast 
the reputation of another by fastening upon him an odious 
or ludicrous nickname. Even the most shining character 
may thus be dragged down by the very reptiles of the 
race to the depths of infamy. A parrot may be taught 
to call names, and, if you have a spite against your neigh¬ 
bor, may be made to give him a deal of annoyance, without 
much wit either in the employer or the puppet. Goethe 
felt this when he made the remark above quoted, which 
was provoked by a coarse pun made on his name by Her¬ 
der. Though no man could better afford to despise such 
a jest, it rankled, apparently, even in his great mind; for, 
forty years later, after Herder’s death, he spoke of it bit¬ 
terly, in the course of a very kindly criticism upon that 
writer, as an instance of the sarcasm which often rendered 
him unamiable. Hotspur would have had a starling taught 
to speak nothing but “ Mortimer ” in the ears of his enemy. 
An insulting or degrading epithet will stick to a man long 
after it has been proved malicious or false. Who could 
dissociate with the name of Van Buren the idea of craft 
or cunning, after he had become known as the “Kinder- 
hook Fox”; or who ever venerated John Tyler as the Chief 
Magistrate of the nation, after he had been politically 
baptized as “His Accidency”? Who can tell how far 


NICKNAMES. 


349 


General Scott’s prospects for the Presidency were dam¬ 
aged by the contemptuous nickname of “ Old Fuss and 
Feathers”; especially after he had nearly signed his own 
political death-warrant by that fatal allusion to “a hasty 
plate of soup,” which convulsed the nation with laughter 
from the St. Croix to the Rio Grande? The hero of Chip¬ 
pewa found it hard to breast the torrent of ridicule which 
this derisive title brought down upon him. It would have 
been easier far to stand up against the iron shock of the 
battle-field. Who, again, has forgotten how a would-be 
naval bard of America was “damned to everlasting fame” 
by a verbal tin-pail attached to his name in the form of 
one of his own verses?* “I have heard an eminent char¬ 
acter boast,” says Hazlitt, “that he did more to produce 
the war with Bonaparte by nicknaming him ‘ The Corsi¬ 
can,’ than all the state papers and documents on the sub¬ 
ject put together.” “Give a dog a bad name,” says the 
proverb, “ and you hang him.” It was only necessary to 
nickname Burke “ The Dinner Bell,” to make even his 
rising to speak a signal for a general emptying of the 
house. 

The first step in overthrowing any great social wrong 
is to fix upon it a name which expresses its character. 
From the hour when “ taxation without representation ” 
came to be regarded by our fathers as a synonym for 
“ tyranny,” the cause of the colonies was safe. Had the 
southern slaves been called by no other name than that 
used by their masters,— namely, “servants,”—they would 
have been kept in bondage till they had won their 
freedom by the sword. 

The French Revolution of 1789 was fruitful of examples 

♦“The sun has gone down with his battle-stained eye.” 


350 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


showing the ease with which ignorant men are led and 
excited by words whose real import and tendency they do 
not understand, and illustrating the truth of South’s 
remark, that a plausible and insignificant word in the 
mouth of an expert demagogue is a dangerous and destruc¬ 
tive weapon. Napoleon was aware of this, when he de¬ 
clared that “ it is by epithets that you govern mankind.” 
Destroy men’s reverence for the names of institutions hoary 
with age, and you destroy the institutions themselves. 
“Pull down the nests,” John Knox used to say, “and the 
rooks will fly away.” The people of Versailles insulted 
with impunity in the streets, and at the gates of the Assem¬ 
bly, those whom they called “Aristocrats”; and the magic 
power of the word was doubled, when aided by the further 
device of calling the usurping Commons the “ National As¬ 
sembly.” When the title of Frondeurs , or “the Slingers,” 
was given to Cardinal de Retz’s party, he encouraged its 
application, “for we observed,” says he, “that the distinc¬ 
tion of a name healed the minds of the people.” The French 
showman, who, when royalty and its forms were abolished 
in France, changed the name of his “Royal Tiger,” so 
called,— the pride of his menagerie,—to “ National Tiger,” 
showed a profound knowledge of his countrymen and of the 
catchwords by which to win their patronage. 

A nickname is the most stinging of all species of satire, 
because it gives no chance of reply. Attack a man with 
specific, point-blank charges, and he can meet and repel 
them; but a nickname baffles reply by its very vagueness; 
it presents no tangible or definite idea to the mind, no horn 
of a dilemma with which the victim can grapple. The very 
attempt to defend himself only renders him the more ridic¬ 
ulous; it looks like raising an ocean to drown a fly, or 


NICKNAMES. 


351 


firing a cannon at a wasp, to meet a petty gibe with formal 
testimony or elaborate argument. Or, if your defence is 
listened to without jeers, it avails you nothing. It has no 
effect,— does not tell,— excites no sensation. The laugh is 
against you, and all your protests come like the physician’s 
prescription at the funeral, too late. 

The significance of nicknames is strikingly illustrated 
by the fact that, as a late writer suggests, you cannot prop¬ 
erly hate a man of different opinions from your own till 
you have labelled him with some unpleasant epithet. In 
theological debates, a heretic may be defined as a man with 
a nickname. Till we have succeeded in fastening a name 
upon him, he is confounded among the general mass of the 
orthodox; his peculiarities are presumably not sufficient to 
constitute him into a separate species. But let the name 
come to us by a flash of inspiration, and how it sticks to the 
victim through his whole life! There is a refinement of 
cruelty in some nicknames which resembles the barbarity of 
the old heathen persecutors, who wrapped up Christians in 
the skins of wild beasts, so that they might be worried and 
torn in pieces by dogs. “ Do but paint an angel black,” 
says an old divine, “ and that is enough to make him pass 
for a devil.” On the other hand, there are loving nick¬ 
names, which are given to men by their friends,— especially 
to those who are of a frank, genial, companionable nature. 
The name of Charles Lamb was ingeniously transformed 
into the Latin diminutive Carlagmilus ; and the friends of 
Keats, in allusion to his occasional excess of fun and animal 
spirits, punned upon his name, shortening it from John 
Keats into “Junkets.” 

That prince of polemics, Cobbett, was a masterly in¬ 
ventor of nicknames, and some of his felicitous epithets will 


352 


words; their use and abuse. 


not be forgotten for many years to come. Among the 
witty labels with which he ticketed his enemies were 
“Scorpion Stanley,” “Spinning Jenny Peel,” “the pink¬ 
nosed Liverpool,” “ the unbaptized, buttonless blackguards ” 
(applied to the Quakers), and “ Prosperity Robinson.” The 
nickname, “ Old Glory,” given by him, stuck for life to Sir 
Francis Burdett, his former patron and life-long creditor. 
“iEolus Canning” provoked unextinguishable laughter 
among high and low; and it is said that of all the devices 
to annoy the brilliant but vain Lord Erskine, none was 
more teasing than being constantly addressed by his second 
title of “ Baron Clackmannon ” One of the literary tricks 
of Carlyle is to heap contemptuous nicknames upon the 
objects he dislikes; as, “The Dismal Science” of Political 
Economy, “ The Nigger Question,” “ Pig Philosophy,” 
“ Horse-hair and Bombazine Procedure,” etc. 

The meaning of nicknames, as of many other words, is 
often a mystery. Often they are apparently meaningless, 
and incapable of any rational explanation; yet they are 
probably due, in such cases, to some subtle, imperceptible 
analogy, of which even their authors were hardly conscious, 
When the English and French armies were encamped in 
the Crimea, they, by common consent, called the Turks 
“Bono Johny;” but it would not be easy to tell why. A 
late French prince was called “ Plomb-plomb ”; yet there 
is no such word in the French language, and different 
accounts have been given of its origin. To explain, again, 
why nicknames have such an influence,— so magical an 
effect,— is equally difficult; one might as well try to ex¬ 
plain why certain combinations of colors or musical sounds 
impart an exquisite pleasure. All we know, upon both 
these points, is, that certain persons are doomed to be 


NICKNAMES. 


353 


known by a nickname; at the time of life when the 
word-making faculty is in the highest activity, all their 
acquaintances are long in labor to hit off the fit appel¬ 
lation; suddenly it comes like an electric spark, and it is 
felt by everybody to be impossible to think of the victim 
without his appropriate designation. In vain have his 
godfathers and godmothers called him Robert or Thomas; 
“Bob,” or “Tom,” or something wholly unrelated to these, 
he is fated to be to the end of his days. 

Many of the happiest of these head marks, which stick 
like a burr from the moment they are invented, are from 
sources utterly unknown; they appear, they are on every¬ 
body’s lips, but whence they came nobody can tell. One 
of the commonest ways in which nicknames are suggested 
is by some egregious blunder which one makes. Thus, I 
knew a schoolboy to be asked who demolished Carthage, and 
upon his answering “ Scorpio Africanus,” to be promptly 
nicknamed “ Old Scorp.” Another way is by a glaring 
contradiction between a man’s name and his character,— 
when he is ridiculed as sailing under false colors, or 
claiming a merit which does not belong to him. There 
is in all men, as Trench has observed, a sense of the 
significance of names,— a feeling that they ought to be, 
and in a world of absolute truth would be, the utterance 
of the innermost character or qualities of the persons 
that bear them; and hence nothing is more telling in a 
personal controversy than the exposure of a striking incon¬ 
gruity between a name and the person who owns it. I 
have been told that the late President Lincoln, on being 
introduced to a very stout person by the name of Small, 
remarked, “Small, Small! Well, what strange names they 
do give men, to be sure! Why, they’ve got a fellow down 


354 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


in Virginia whom they call Wise /” In the same spirit, 
Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church, being engaged 
in controversy with one Vigilantius, i.e ., “the Watchful,” 
about certain vigils which the latter opposed, stigmatized 
him as Dormitantius, or “the Sleeper.” But more fre¬ 
quently the nickname is suggested by the real name where 
there is no such antagonism between them,— where the 
latter, as it is, or by a slight change, can be made to con¬ 
tain a confession of the ignorance or folly of the bearer. 
Thus, Tiberius Claudius Nero, in allusion to his drunken¬ 
ness, was called “ Biberius Caldius Mero”; and the Arians 
were nicknamed “Ariomanites.” What can be happier 
in this way than the “ Brand of Hell,” applied to Pope 
Hildebrand; the title of “Slanders,” affixed by Fuller to 
Sanders, the foul-mouthed libeller of Queen Elizabeth; the 
“Vanity” and “Sterility,” which Baxter coined from the 
names of Vane and Sterry; and the term “ Sweepnet,” 
which that skilful master of the passions, Cicero, gave to 
the infamous Praetor of Sicily, whose name, Verres ( verro ), 
was prophetic of his “sweeping” the province,— declaring 
that others might be partial to the jus verrinum (which 
might mean verrine law or boar sauce), but not he? On 
the other hand, the nickname Schinokephalos, or “ onion- 
head,” which the Athenians gave to Pericles on account 
of the shape of his head, was unredeemed by wit or humor. 

The people of Italy are exceedingly fond of nicknames; 
and it is an odd peculiarity of many which they give that 
the persons so characterized are known only by their 
nicknames. In the case of many celebrated persons the 
nickname has wholly obliterated the true name. Thus 
Guercino “ Squint Eye,” Masaccio “ Dirty Tom,” Tintoretto 
“ The Little Dyer,” Ghirlandaio “ The Garland-Maker,” 


NICKNAMES. 


355 


Luca del Robbia “ Luke of the Madder,” Spagnoletto 
“ The Little Spaniard,” and Del Sarto “ The Tailor’s Son,” 
would scarcely be recognized under their proper names of 
Barbieri, Guido, Robusti, Barbarelli, Corradi, Ribera, and 
Yannachi. The following, too, are all nicknames of emi¬ 
nent persons derived from their places of birth: Perugino, 
Veronese, Aretino, Pisano, Giulio Romano, Correggio, Par- 
megiano.* 

There is probably no country, unless it be our own, in 
which nicknames have flourished more than in England. 
Every party there has had its watchwords with which to 
rally its members, or to set on its own bandogs to worry and 
tear those of another faction; and what is quite extraordi¬ 
nary is, that many of the names of political parties and 
religious sects were originally nicknames given in the 
bitterest scorn and party hate, yet ultimately accepted by 
the party themselves. Thus “Tory” originally meant an 
Irish freebooting bog-trotter,— an outlaw who favored the 
cause of James II; and “ Whig” is derived from the Scotch 
name for sour milk, which was supposed aptly to charac¬ 
terize the disposition of the Republicans. “Methodists” 
was a name given in 1729, first to John and Charles 
Wesley at Oxford, on account of their close observance of 
system and method in their studies and worship, and after¬ 
ward to their followers. So in other countries, the “Lu¬ 
therans” received their name, in which they now glory, from 
their antagonists. “Capuchin” was a jesting name given 
by the boys in the streets to certain Franciscan monks, on 
account of the peaked and pointed hood ( capuccio ) which 
they wore. The Dominicans gloried all the more in their 
name when it was resolved by their enemies into Domini 
. * “Roba di Roma,” by W. W. Story. 


356 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


canes ; they were proud to acknowledge that they were, in¬ 
deed, “the Lord’s watchdogs,” who barked at the slightest 
appearance of heresy, and strove to drive it away. Finally, 
the highest name which any man can bear was originally 
a nickname given by the idle and witty inhabitants of 
Antioch, in Asia Minor. In the early days of Christianity, 
when the new faith was preached with all the vigor of 
intense conviction, and the enthusiasm attendant upon a 
fresh experiment in private and social morality; when 
the apostles were said to be “ turning the world upside 
down,” and were, indeed, promulgating a religion which 
was soon to revolutionize civilized society; there was, for 
a long time, great difficulty in finding a name for the new 
faith and its professors. The apostles, indeed, had no 
name for it whatever; they spoke of the nascent religion 
simply as “the way,” or “this way.” Paul says that he 
“persecuted this ivay unto the death,” and at Ephesus, it 
is said, “ there arose no small stir about the ivay .” By the 
Jews the converts to the new religion were called “ Naza- 
renes,” a term of contempt which they could not, of course, 
adopt. The Jews believed in the coming of a Messiah, 
though they rejected the true one; but the appearance of 
any Christ was a wholly new and original idea to the 
pagan world, and the constant repetition of the striking 
name of Christ in the discourses of the missionaries at 
Antioch, would have naturally suggested to the keen¬ 
witted Greek pagans around them to call them after the 
name of their Master. The Antiochenes were famous in 
all antiquity for their nicknames, for inventing which 
they had a positive genius; and it is altogether probable, 
— indeed, there is hardly a doubt,— that the name “Chris¬ 
tian” was originally a term of ridicule or of reproach, 


NICKNAMES. 


357 


given by them to the first converts from paganism. It 
was, in fact, a nickname, designed to intimate that the 
teachers and the taught, who talked continually about 
their Christ, were a set of fanatics who deserved only to 
be laughed at for their infatuation. But what was thus 
meant as an insult was instantly accepted by the believers 
in Christ as a title of honor, implying that devotion to 
Christ was not an accident, but the very essence and soul 
of their religion. “Nothing else,” says Canon Liddon, 
“ expressed so tersely the central reason for the fierce 
antagonism of the pagans to the new religiQn: it was the 
religion of the divine, but crucified Christ; nothing else 
expressed so adequately the Christian sense of what Chris¬ 
tianity was and is,— a religion not merely founded by 
Christ, but centring in Christ, so that, apart from Him, 
it has, properly speaking, no existence, so that it exists 
only as an extension and perpetuation of His life.” 

The Dutch people long prided themselves on the humili¬ 
ating nickname of Les Gueulx, “the Beggars,” which 
was given in 1566 to the revolters against the rule of 
Philip II. Margaret of Parma, then governor of the 
Netherlands, being somewhat disconcerted at the numbers 
of that party, when they presented a petition to her, was 
reassured by her minister, who remarked to her that there 
was nothing to be feared from a crowd of beggars. 
“Great was the indignation of all,” says Motley, “that 
the state councillor (the Seigneur de Berlaymont.) should 
have dared to stigmatize as beggars a band of gentlemen 
with the best blood of the land in their veins. Brederode, 
on the contrary, smoothing their anger, assured them with 
good humor that nothing could be more fortunate. * They 
call us “ beggars!” ’ said he; ‘let us accept the name. We 


358 


words; their use and abuse. 


will contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the 
king, till compelled to wear the beggar’s sack. . . Long 
live the beggars!’ he cried, as he wiped his beard, and set 
the bowl down; ‘ Vivent les gueulxV Then, for the first 
time, from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous 
cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid 
blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke 
and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of 
Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. 
The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they 
had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies 
had provided them with a spell, which was to prove, 
in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace 
or hovel, as the deeds of the ‘ wild beggars ’ the ‘ wood 
beggars,’ and the ‘ beggars of the sea,’ taught Philip at last 
to understand the nation which he had driven to madness.” 

In like manner the French Protestants accepted and 
gloried in the scornful nickname of the “ Huguenots,” as 
did the two fierce Italian factions in those of “ Guelphs,” 
or “Guelfs,” and “ Ghibellines.” It was in the twelfth 
century, at the siege of Weinsberg, a hereditary possession 
of the Welfs, that the war-cries, “Hurrah for Welf! ” 
“Hurrah for Waibling!” which gave rise to the party 
names, “Welfs” and “Waiblings” (Italice, “Guelfs” and 
“Ghibellines”), were first heard. Even the title of the 
British “ Premier,” or “ Prime Minister,” now one of the 
highest dignity, was at first a nickname, given in pure 
mockery,— the statesman to whom it was applied being 
Sir Robert Walpole, as will be seen by the following words 
spoken by him in the House of Commons in 1742: “ Hav¬ 
ing invested me with a kind of mock dignity, and styled 
me a * Prime Minister,’ they (the opposition) impute to me 


NICKNAMES. 


359 


an unpardonable abuse of the chimerical authority which 
they only created and conferred.” It is remarkable that 
the nickname Caesar has given the title to the heads of 
two great nations, Germany and Russia ( kaiser , czar). 

It is a fortunate thing when men who have been 
branded with names intended to make them hateful or 
ridiculous, can thus turn the tables on their denigreurs , 
by accepting and glorying in their new titles. It was 
this which Lord Halifax did when he was called “ a trim¬ 
mer.” Instead of quarrelling with the nickname, he ex¬ 
ulted in it as a title of honor. “ Everything good,” he 
said, “ trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims 
between the climate in which men are roasted, and the 
climate in which men are frozen. The English Church 
trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist 
lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish 
despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a 
just temper between propensities, any one of which, in¬ 
dulged to excess, becomes vice. Nay, the perfection of 
the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact equilib¬ 
rium of attributes, none of which could preponderate 
without disturbing the whole moral and physical order 
of the world.” * 

The nicknames “ Quaker,” “ Puritan,” “ Roundhead,” 
unlike those we have just named, were never accepted by 
those to whom they were given. “Puritan” was first 
heard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was given to 
a party of purists who would have reformed the Reforma¬ 
tion. They were also ridiculed, from their fastidiousness 
about trivial matters, as “ Precisians ”; Drayton charac¬ 
terizes them as persons that for a painted glass window 

♦Macaulay’s “History of England,” Vol. II. 


360 


words; their use akd abuse. 


would pull down the whole church. The distinction 
between “Roundhead” and “Cavalier” first appeared dur¬ 
ing the civil war between Charles I and his Parliament. 
A foe to all outward ornament, the “ Roundhead ” wore 
his hair cropped close, while the “Cavalier” was contra¬ 
distinguished by his chivalrous tone, his romantic spirit, 
and his flowing locks. 

All readers of history are familiar with “ The Rump,”— 
the contemptuous nickname given to the Long Parliament 
at the close of its career. The “Rump,” Mr. Disraeli 
remarks, became a perpetual whetstone for the loyal wits, 
till at length its former admirers, the rabble themselves, 
in town and country, vied with each other in burning 
rumps of beef, which were hung by chains on a gallows 
with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people, 
like children, come at length to make a plaything of that 
which was once their bugbear. 

A member of the British Parliament in the reign of 
George III is known as “ Single-speech Hamilton,” and is 
referred to by that designation as invariably as if it were 
his baptismal name. He made one, and but one, good 
speech during his parliamentary career. “ Boot-jack Rob¬ 
inson” was the derisive title given to a mediocre politician, 
who, during a crisis in the ministry of the Duke of New¬ 
castle, was made Home Secretary and ministerial leader 
of the House of Commons. “Sir Thomas Robinson lead 
us!” indignantly exclaimed Pitt to Fox; “the duke might 
as well send his boot-jack to lead us!” It is said that 
Mr. Dundas, afterward Lord Melville, got his nickname 
from a new word which he introduced in a speech in the 
House of Commons, in 1775, on the American war. He 
was the first to use the word “ starvation ” (a hybrid 


NICKNAMES. 


361 


formation, in which a Saxon root was united with a Latin 
ending), which provoked shouts of contemptuous laughter 
in the House; and he was always afterward called by his 
acquaintances, “ Starvation Dundas.” This poor specimen 
of word-coining was long resisted by the lexicographers; 
and one modern philological dictionary omits it even now; 
but it has long been sanctioned by usage. One of the 
most fatal nicknames ever given to a politician was one 
fastened by Sheridan upon Addington, the Prime Minister 
of England, in a speech made in Parliament in 1803. 
Addington was the son of an eminent physician, and some¬ 
thing in his air and manner had given him, to a limited 
extent, the name of “ the Doctor.” Sheridan, alluding to 
the personal dislike of Addington felt by many, quoted the 
well known epigram of Martial: 

“Non amo te, Sabine, nec possum dicere quare; 

Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te;” 

and added the English parody: 

“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, 

The reason why I cannot tell; 

But this, I’m sure, I know full well, 

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.” 

His droll emphasis on the word “Doctor,” and the repe¬ 
tition of it in the course of the speech, drew forth peals 
of laughter; and henceforth the butt of his ridicule was 
generally known as “ The Doctor.” The Opposition news¬ 
papers caught up the title, and rang innumerable changes 
upon it, till finally the Prime Minister was fairly over¬ 
whelmed by the laughter of his enemies, and forced to 
resign his office. 

Everybody has heard of “Ditto to Mr. Burke”; the 
victim of this title was a Mr. Conger, who was elected with 


362 


words; their use and abuse. 


Burke to represent the city of Bristol. Utterly bewildered 
as to how to thank the electors after his associate’s splen¬ 
did speech, he condensed his own address into these sig¬ 
nificant words: “Gentlemen, I say ditto to Mr. Burke, ditto 
to Mr. Burke!” “Chicken Taylor” was the name which, 
in the early part of the century, long stuck to Mr. M. A. 
Taylor; he contended against a great lawyer in the House, 
and then apologized that he, “ a chicken in the law, should 
venture on a fight with the cock of Westminster.” “Adul- 
lamites,” or “ Dwellers in the Cave,” the name given by 
Mr. Bright to Mr. Lowe and some of his Liberal friends,— 
a name derived from the Scripture story of David and his 
followers retiring to a cave,—will probably long continue 
to be applied to the members of a discontented faction. 

Who does not remember the nickname, “ The Spasmodic 
School of Poetry,” which was given to three or four young 
poets some thirty years ago? It was in the brain of Pro¬ 
fessor Aytoun that this title originated, and immediately 
these writers, whose salient faults were thus felicitously 
hit off, were everywhere recognized as “ spasmodists.” For 
years after, no one of these minstrels could strike his lyre 
in public, even in the most humdrum, old-fashioned wa} T , 
but the cry of “spasmodist” was raised so loudly that he 
was glad to retreat into his wonted obscurity. Even Ben 
Jonson, the sturdy old dramatist, did not escape a nick¬ 
name. His envious rivals dubbed him “The Limestone 
and Mortar Poet,” in allusion to his lack of spontaneity 
as a poet, and his having begun life as a bricklayer. 

Among the other memorable English nicknames, that of 
“Jemmy Twitcher,” taken from the chief of Macheath’s 
gang in “ The Beggar’s Opera,” and applied to Lord Sand¬ 
wich,— that of “Orange Peel,” given to Sir Robert Peel by 


NICKNAMES. 


363 


the Irish, the inveterate foes of the House of Orange,— 
“ the stormy Petrel of debate,” given to Mr. Bernal 
Osborne,—“ Finality Russell,” fastened upon Lord John 
Russell because he wished a certain Reform measure to 
be final,—“The Dandy Demagogue,” given to Mr. T. S. 
Duncombe, the able parliamentary advocate of the people, 
who was distinguished by the remarkable elegance and 
finish of his attire,— the unique “ Dizzy,” into which his 
enemies condensed the name of the celebrated Jewish 
premier,— and the “Who? Who? Ministry,” applied to 
Lord Derby’s Cabinet in 1852,— are preeminently signifi¬ 
cant and telling. Among the hundreds of American polit¬ 
ical nicknames, there are many which are not remarkably 
expressive; others, like “Old Bullion” and “Old Hickory,” 
are steeped in “ the very brine of conceit,” and sum up 
a character as if by inspiration. 

It is a curious fact that some of the most damaging 
nicknames have been terms or epithets which were origi¬ 
nally complimentary, but which, used sarcastically, have 
been associated with more ridicule or odium than the most 
opprobrious epithets. Men hate to be continually reminded 
of any one virtue of a fellow-man,— to hear the changes 
rung continually upon some one great action or daring 
feat he has performed. It seems, indeed, as if a man 
whose name is continually dinned in our ears, coupled with 
some complimentary epithet, some allusion to a praise¬ 
worthy deed which he once did, or some excellent trait of 
character, must be distinguished for nothing else. Unless 
this is his only virtue, why all this fuss and pother about 
it? The Athenians banished Aristides, because they were 
tired of hearing him called “the Just.” 

Some parents have so great a dread of nicknames that 


364 


words: their use and abuse. 


they tax their ingenuity to invent for their children a 
Christian name that may defy nicking or abbreviation. 
With Southey’s Doctor Dove, they think “it is not a good 
thing to be Tom’d or Bob’d, Jack’d or Jim’d, Sam’d or 
Ben’d, Natty’d or Batty’d, Neddy’d or Teddy’d, Will’d or 
Bill’d, Dick’d or Nick’d, Joe’d or Jerry’d, as you go 
through the world.” The good doctor, however, had no 
such antipathy to the shortening of female names. “ He 
never called any woman Mary, though Mare , he said, being 
the sea, was in many respects too emblematic of the sex. 
It was better to use a synonym of better omen, and Molly 
was therefore preferred, as being soft. If he accosted a 
vixen of that name in her worst temper, he Mollyfied her! 
On the contrary, he never could be induced to substitute 
Sally for Sarah. Sally, he said, had a salacious sound, and, 
moreover, it reminded him of rovers, which women ought 
not to be. Martha he called Patty, because it came pat 
to the tongue. Dorothy remained Dorothy, because it 
was neither fitting that women should be made Dolls, nor 
I-dols! Susan with him was always Sue, because women 
were to be sued, and Winnifred, Winny, because they 
were to be won.” * 

The annoyance which may be given to a man, even by 
an apparently meaningless nickname, which sticks to him 
wherever he goes, is well illustrated by a story told by 
Hazlitt in his “ Conversations with Northcote,” the painter. 
A village baker got, he knew not how, the name of “ Tiddy- 
doll.” He was teased and worried by it till it almost drove 
him crazy. The boys hallooed it after him in the streets, 
and poked their faces into his shop-windows; the parrots 
echoed the name as he passed their cages; and even the 


* “The Doctor,” Vol. VII. 


NICKNAMES. 


365 


soldiers took it up (for the place was a military station), 
and marched to parade, beating time with their feet, and 
singing “ Tiddy-doll, Tiddy-doll,” as they passed by his door. 
He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable 
fury, was knocked down and rolled into the kennel, and 
got up in an agony of rage, his white clothes drabbled and 
bespattered with mud. A respectable and friendly gentle¬ 
man in the neighborhood, who pitied his weakness, called 
him into his house one day, and remonstrated with him 
on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his 
persecutors. “What,” said he, “ does it signify? Suppose 
they do call you ‘ Tiddy-doll?’ What harm?” “There ,— 
there it is again!" burst forth the infuriated baker; “you’ve 
called me so yourself. You called me in on purpose to 
insult me!” And, saying this, he vented his rage in a 
torrent of abusive epithets, and darted out of the house 
in a tempest of passion. 

The readers of Boswell will remember, in connection 
with this subject, an amusing anecdote told of Dr. Johnson. 
Being rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a stout 
fish-woman, as he was passing through Billingsgate, he 
looked straight at her, and said deliberately, “You are a 
triangle!” which made her swear louder than before. He 
then called her “a rectangle! a parallelogram!” but she 
was more voluble still. At last he screamed out, “ You 
are a miserable, wicked hypothenuse! ” and she was struck 
dumb. Curran had a similar ludicrous encounter with 
a fish-woman at Cork. Taking up the gauntlet, when 
assailed by her on the quay, he speedily found that he was 
overmatched, and that he had nothing to do but to beat 
a retreat. “This, however, was to be done with dignity; 
so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, ‘ Madam, I scorn 


366 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


all further discourse with such an individual! ’ She did not 
understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very 
hyperbole of opprobrium. ‘ Individual, you wagabond! ’ 
she screamed, ‘ what do you mean by that? I’m no more 
an individual than your mother was! ’ Never was victory 
more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, 
and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory.” 


CHAPTER XV. 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


Language is the depository of the accumulated body of experience, to 
which all former ages have contributed their part, and which is the inherit¬ 
ance of all yet to come.—J. S. Mill. 

Often in words contemplated singly there are boundless stores of moral 
and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up. — Trench. 



THOUGHTFUL English writer tells us that, when 


about nine years old, he learned with much surprise 
that the word “ sincere ” was derived from the practice of 
filling up flaws in furniture with wax, -whence sine cera 
came to mean pure, not vamped up or adulterated. This 
explanation gave him great pleasure, and abode in his 
memory as having first shown him that there is a reason in 
words as well as things. There are few cultivated persons 
who have not felt, at some time in their lives, a thrill of 
surprise and delight like that of this writer. Throughout 
our whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, the stream of 
our history, inner and outer, runs wonderfully blended 
with the texture of the words we use. Dive into what 
subject we will, we never touch the bottom. The simplest 
prattle of a child is but the light surface of a deep sea con¬ 
taining many treasures. It would be hard, therefore, to 
find in the whole range of inquiry another study which at 
once is so fascinating, and so richly repays the labor, as 
that of the etymology or primitive significations of words. 

It is an epoch in one’s intellectual history when he first 
learns that -words are living and not dead things,— that in 


367 


368 


words; their use and abuse. 


these children of the mind are incarnated the wit and wis¬ 
dom, the poetic fancies and the deep intuitions, the passion¬ 
ate longings and the happy or sad experiences of many 
generations. The discovery is “like the dropping of scales 
from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the 
introduction into a new world;” he never ceases wondering 
at the moral marvels that everywhere reveal themselves to 
his gaze. To eyes thus opened, dictionaries, instead of 
seeming huge masses of word-lumber, become vast store¬ 
houses of historical memorials, than which none are more 
vital in spirit or more pregnant with meaning. It is not 
in oriental fairy-tales only that persons drop pearls every 
time they open their mouths; like Moliere’s Bourgeois 
Gentilhomme, who had been speaking prose all his life 
without knowing it, we are dropping gems from our lips in 
almost every hour of the day. Not a thought, or feeling, or 
wish can we utter without recalling, by an unconscious 
sign or symbol, some historic fact, some memory of “ auld 
lang syne,” some bygone custom, some vanished supersti¬ 
tion, some exploded prejudice, or some ethical divination 
that has lost its charm. Even the homeliest and most 
familiar words, the most hackneyed phrases, are connected 
by imperceptible ties with the hopes and fears, the reason¬ 
ings and reflections, of bygone men and times. 

Every generation of men inherits and uses all the scien¬ 
tific wealth of the past. “It is not merely the great and 
rich in the intellectual world who are thus blessed, but the 
humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, 
^benefits by the labors of the greatest. When he counts his 
little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear 
the image and superscription of ancient and modern intel¬ 
lectual dynasties, and that in virtue of this possession 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


369 


acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his 
reach, which none could ever have attained to, if it were 
not that the gold of truth once dug out of the mine circu¬ 
lates more and more widely among mankind.” Emerson 
beautifully calls language “ fossil poetry.” The etymolo¬ 
gist, he adds, finds the deadest word to have been once a 
brilliant picture. “ As the limestone of the continent con¬ 
sists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so 
language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in 
their secondary use, have long since ceased to remind us of 
their poetic origin.” 

Not only is this true, but many a single word, as Arch¬ 
bishop Trench remarks, is itself a concentrated poem, in 
which are treasured stores of poetical thought and imagery. 
Examine it closely, and it will be found to rest upon some 
palpable or subtle analogy of things material and spiritual, 
showing that, however trite the image now, the man who 
first coined the word was a poet. The older the word, the 
profounder and more beautiful the meanings it will often 
be found to inclose; for words of late growth speak to the 
head, not to the heart; thoughts and feelings are too subtle 
for new words, and are conveyed only by those about which 
cluster many associations. It is the use of words when new 
and fresh from the lips of their inventors, before their vivid 
and picturesque meanings have faded out or been obscured 
by their many secondary significations, that gives such pic¬ 
torial beauty, pith, and raciness, to the early writers; “ and 
hence to recall language, to restore its early meanings, to 
re-mint it in novel forms, is the secret of all effective 
writing and speaking,— of all verbal expression which is to 
leave, as was said of the eloquence of Pericles, stings in the 
minds and memories of the hearers.” 


370 


words; their use and abuse. 


Language is not only “ fossil poetry,” but it is also fossil 
philosophy, fossil ethics, and fossil history. As in the pre- 
Adamite rock are bound up and preserved the vegetable 
and animal forms of ages long gone by, so in words are 
locked up truths once known but now forgotten,— the 
thoughts and feelings, the habits, customs, opinions, virtues 
and vices of men long since in their graves. Language is, 
in short, “ the depository of the accumulated body of experi¬ 
ence, to which all former ages have contributed their part, 
and which is the inheritance of all yet to come.” * It is 
“like amber, circulating the electric spirit of truth, and 
preserving the relics of ancient wisdom.” f Compared with 
this memorial of the past, these records of ancient and 
modern intellectual dynasties, how poor are all other mon¬ 
uments of human power, perseverance, skill, or genius! 
Unlike the works of individual genius, or the cuneiform 
inscriptions which are found in oriental countries on the 
crumbling fragments of half-calcined stone, language gives 
us the history not only of individuals, but of nations; not 
only of nations, but of mankind. It is, indeed, “an admi¬ 
rable poem on the history of all ages; a living monument 
on which is written the genesis of human thought. Thus 
‘ the ground on which our civilization stands is a sacred 
one, for it is the deposit of thought. For language, as it 
is the mirror, so it is the product of reason, and, as it 
embodies thought, so it is the child of thought. In it are 
embodied the sparks of that celestial fire which from a 
once bright centre of civilization has streamed forth over 
the inhabited earth, and which now already, after less than 
three myriads of years, forms a galaxy round the globe, a 
chain of light from pole to pole.’ ” 

* Mill’s “Logic.” t Coleridge. 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


371 


How pregnant with instruction is often the history of 
a single word! Coleridge, who keenly appreciated the sig¬ 
nificance of words, says that there are cases where more 
knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history 
of a word than by the history of a campaign. Sometimes 
the germ of a nation’s life,—- the philosophy of some politi¬ 
cal, moral, or intellectual movement in a country,— will 
be found coiled up in a single word, just as the oak is 
found in an acorn. The word “ ostracize ” gives us a 
vivid picture of the Athenian democracy, and of the 
period when oyster-shells were used for ballots. It calls 
up the barbarity which held an election of candidates for 
banishment; the arbitrary power which enabled the vilest 
of the citizens, from mere envy of the reputation of the 
best man in the city, to make him an exile; and the utter 
lack and desecration of liberty, while its forms were 
fetiches for the popular worship. The fact that the Arabs 
were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, 
and the merchants of the Middle Ages, is shown by the 
words we have borrowed from them,— “algebra,” “alma¬ 
nac,” “cypher,” “zero,” “zenith,” “alkali,” “alcohol,” 
“alchemy,” “alembic,” “magazine,” “tariff,” “cotton,” 
“elixir”; and so that the monastic system originated in 
the Greek, and not in the Latin church, is shown by the 
fact that the words expressing the chief elements of the 
system, as “monk,” “ monastery,” “anchorite,” “cenobite,” 
“ ascetic,” “ hermit,” are Greek, not Latin. What an 
amount of history is wrapped up in the word “ Pagan ” ! 
The term, we learn from Gibbon, is remotely derived from 
Ildyr), in the Doric dialect, signifying a fountain; and the 
rural neighborhood which frequented the same derived the 
common appellation of Pagus and “ Pagans.” Soon “ Pa- 


372 


words; their use and abuse. 


gan” and “rural” became nearly synonymous, and the 
meaner peasants acquired that name which has been cor¬ 
rupted into “ peasant ” in the modern languages of Europe. 
All non-military people soon came to be branded as Pagans. 
The Christians were the soldiers of Christ; their adversa¬ 
ries, who refused the “ sacrament,” or military oath of bap¬ 
tism, might deserve the metaphorical name of Pagans. 
Christianity gradually filled the cities of the empire; the 
old religion retired and languished, in the time of Pru- 
dentius, in obscure villages. From Pagus, as a root, comes 
pagius, first a villager, then a rural laborer, then a serv¬ 
ant, lastly a “ page.” Pagina , first the inclosed square of 
cultivated land near a village, graduated into the “ page ” 
of a book. Pagare, from denoting the “ field service ” that 
compensated the provider of food and raiment, was ap¬ 
plied eventually to every form in which the changes of 
society required the benefited to “ pay ” for what they re¬ 
ceived. Again, when a Scotchman speaks of his “shackle- 
bone,” he not only conveys an idea of his wrist, but 
discovers by this very term that slavery, or vassalage, con¬ 
tinued so long in Scotland as to impress itself indelibly on 
the language of the country. 

Often where history is utterly dumb concerning the 
past, language speaks. The discovery of the foot-print 
on the sand did not more certainly prove to Robinson 
Crusoe that the island of which he had fancied himself the 
sole inhabitant contained a brother man, than the simi¬ 
larity of the inflections in the speech of different peoples 
proves their brotherhood. Were all the histories of Eng¬ 
land swept from existence, the study of its language,— 
developing the fact that the basis of the language is Saxon, 
that the names of the prominent objects of nature are 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


373 


Celtic, the terms of war and government Norman-French, 
the ecclesiastical terms Latin,— would enable us to recon¬ 
struct a large part of the story of the past, as it even now 
enables us to verify many of the statements of the chron¬ 
iclers. Humboldt, in his “ Cosmos,” eulogizes the study 
of words as one of the richest sources of historical knowl¬ 
edge; and it is probable that what comparative philology, 
yet in its infancy, has already discovered, will compel a 
rewriting of the history of the world. Even now it has 
thrown light on many of the most perplexing problems of 
religion, history, and ethnography; and it seems destined 
to triumphs of which we can but dimly apprehend the 
consequences. On the stone tablets of the universe God’s 
own finger has written the changes which millions of 
years have wrought on the mountain and the plain; and 
in the fluid air, which he coins into spoken words, man 
has preserved forever the grand facts of his past history 
and the grand processes of his inmost soul. “ Nations and 
languages against dynasties and treaties,” is the cry which 
is remodelling the map of Europe; and in our country, 
comparative philologists,— to their shame be it said,— 
have labored with satanic zeal to prove the impossibility 
of a common origin of languages and races, in order to 
justify, by scientific arguments, the theory of slavery. It 
has been said that the interpretation of one word in the 
Yedas fifty years earlier would have saved many Hindoo 
widows from being burned alive; and now that the phi¬ 
lologists of Germany and England have shown that the 
iron network of caste , which for centuries has hindered 
the development of India, is not a religious institution, 
and has no authority in their sacred writings, but is the 
invention of an arrogant and usurping priesthood,— or, at 


374 


words; their use and abuse. 


best, an erroneous tradition, due to the half-knowledge 
or to the imposture of the native pundits,— the British 
government will be able to inflict penalties for the ob¬ 
servance of the rules of caste, and thus to relieve India from 
the greatest clog on its progress. 

CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF WORDS. 

Language, as it daguerreotypes human thought, shares, 
as we have seen, in all the vicissitudes of man. It mir¬ 
rors all the changes in the character, tastes, customs, and 
opinions of a people, and shows with unerring faithful¬ 
ness whether, and in what degree, they advance or recede 
in culture or morality. As new ideas germinate in the 
mind of a nation, it will demand new forms of expression; 
on the other hand, a petrified and mechanical national 
mind will as surely betray itself in a petrified and me¬ 
chanical language. It is by no accident or caprice that 

“ Words, whilom flourishing, 

Pass now no more, but banished from the court, 

Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort; 

And those which eld’s strict doom did disallow, 

And damn for bullion, go for current now.” 

Often with the lapse of time the meaning of a word 
changes imperceptibly, until after some centuries it be¬ 
comes the very opposite of what it once was. To dis¬ 
inter these old meanings out of the alluvium and drift 
of ages affords as much pleasure to the linguist as to 
disinter a fossil does to the geologist. 

An exact knowledge of the changes of signification 
which words have undergone is not merely a source of 
pleasure; it is absolutely indispensable to the full under¬ 
standing of old authors. Thus, for example, Milton and 
Thomson use “horrent” and “horrid” for bristling, e.< 7 ., 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


375 


“With dangling ice all horrid .” 

Milton speaks of a “savage” (meaning woody, silva ) hill, 
and of “amiable” (meaning lovely) fruit. Again, in the 
well known lines of the “Allegro,” where, Milton says, 
amongst the cheerful sights of rural morn, 

“And every shepherd tells his tale 
Under the hawthorn in the vale,”— 

the words “tells his tale” do not mean that he is ro¬ 
mancing or making love to the milkmaid, but that he is 
counting his sheep as they pass the hawthorn,— a natural 
and familiar occupation of shepherds on a summer’s 
morning. The primary meaning of “tale” is to count or 
number, as in the German zahlen. It is thus used in 
the Book of Exodus, which states that the Israelites were 
compelled to deliver their “ tale of bricks.” In the English 
“tale” and in the French conte the secondary meaning 
has supplanted the first, though we still speak of “ keep¬ 
ing tally,” of “ untold gold,” and say, “ Here is the sum 
twice-told.” 

Again, Milton’s use of the word “jolly” in the follow¬ 
ing lines from his “ Sonnet to the Nightingale,” strikingly 
illustrates the disadvantages under which poetry in a 
living, and consequently ever-changing, language, labors: 

“Thou with fresh hope the lover’s heart doth fill, 

While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.” 

Though we may know the meaning which the word bore 
a little more than two and a half centuries ago, yet it is 
impossible entirely to banish from the mind the vulgar 
associations which have gathered round it since. 

It has been said that one of the arts of a great poet or 
prose-writer, who wishes to add emphasis to his style,— 


376 


words; their ese and abuse. 


to bring out all the latent forces of his native tongue,— 
will often consist in reconnecting a word with its original 
derivation, in not suffering it to forget itself and its 
father’s house, though it would. This Milton does some¬ 
times with signal effect; but in the great majority of 
cases his meaning becomes obscure to the unlearned reader. 
In a great number of cases we must interpret his words 
rather by their classical meanings than by their English 
use. Thus in “ Paradise Lost,” when Satan speaks of his 
having been pursued by “ Heaven’s afflicting thunder,” the 
poet uses the word “afflicting” in its original primary 
sense of striking down bodily. Properly the word denotes 
a state of mind or feeling only, and is not used to-day 
in a concrete sense. So when Milton, at the opening of 
the same poem, speaks of 

“The secret top 
Of Orel) or of Sinai,” 

the meaning of the word “ secret ” is not that of the Eng¬ 
lish adjective, but is remote, apart, lonely, as in Virgil’s 
secretosque pios. The absurdity of supposing the word 
to be the same as our ordinary adjective led Bentley, 
among many ridiculous “improvements” of Milton’s lan¬ 
guage, to change it to “ sacred.” Again, the word “ recol¬ 
lect” is used in its etymological sense in these lines from 
“Paradise Lost”: 

“But he, his wonted pride 
Soon recollecting, with high words,” etc. 

So Milton uses the word “ astonished ” in its etymological 
sense of “ thunderstruck,” attonitus, as when he makes 
Satan say that his associates 

“ Lie thus astonished on the oblivious pool.” 

Holland, in his translation of Livy, speaks of a knave 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


377 


who threw some heavy stones upon a certain king, 
“ whereof the one smote the king upon his head, the 
other astonished his shoulder.” 

Shakespeare, also, not unfrequently uses words in their 
classical sense. Thus when Cleopatra speaks of 

“ Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal,” 

“ modern ” is used in the sense of “ modal” (from modus , a 
fashion or manner); a modern friend, compared with a 
true friend, being what the fashion of a thing is, com¬ 
pared with the substance. So,— as De Quincey, to whom 
we owe this explanation, has shown,—when in the famous 
picture of life, “All the World’s a Stage,” the justice is 
described as 

“Full of wise saws and modern instances,” 

the meaning is not “fall of wise sayings and modern 
illustrations,” but full of proverbial maxims of conduct 
and of trivial arguments; i.e., of petty distinctions that 
never touch the point at issue. “Instances” is from in- 
stantia , which the monkish and scholastic writers always 
used in the sense of an argument. When in “Julius 
Caesar” we read,— 

“And come down 

With fearful bravery, thinking by this face 
To fasten in our thoughts that they have courage,” 

we must not attach to “bravery” its modern sense; and the 
same remark applies to the word “ extravagant ” in the fol¬ 
lowing passage from “Hamlet”: 

“Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, 

The extravagant and erring spirit hies 
To his confine,” etc. 

“Courage” is “good heart.” “Anecdote,” — from the 
Greek dv (not), ix (out), and ddra (given),— meant once a 


378 


words; their use and abuse. 


fact not given out or published; now it means a short, 
amusing story. Procopius, a Greek historian in the reign 
of Justinian, is said to have coined the word. Not daring, 
for fear of torture and death, to speak of some living per¬ 
sons as they deserved, he wrote a work which he called 
“ Anecdotes,” or a “ Secret History.” The instant an anec¬ 
dote is published, it belies its title; it is no longer an 
anecdote. “Allowance” formerly was used to denote 
praise or approval; as when Shakespeare says in “ Troilus 
and Cressida,” 

“A stirring dwarf we do allowance give 
Before a sleeping giant.” 

“ To prevent,” which now means to hinder or obstruct, sig¬ 
nified, in its Latin etymology, to anticipate, to get the start 
of, and is thus used in the Old Testament. “ Girl ” once 
designated a young person of either sex. “Widow” was 
applied to men as well as women. “Sagacious” once 
meant quick-smelling, as in the line 

“The hound sagacious of the tainted prey.” 

“ Bascal,” according to Verstegan, primarily meant an 
“ il-favoured, lean, and worthelesse deer.” Thus Shake¬ 
speare : 

“Horns! the noblest deer hath them as huge as the rascal.” 

Afterward it denoted the common people, the plebs as dis¬ 
tinguished from the populus. A “ naturalist ” was once a 
person who rejected revealed truth, and believed only in nat¬ 
ural religion. He is now an investigator of nature and her 
laws, and often a believer in Christianity. “Blackguards” 
were formerly the scullions, turnspits, and other meaner 
retainers in a great household, who, when a change was 
made from one residence to another, accompanied and took 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


379 


care of the pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils, by which 
they were smutted. Webster, in his play of “The White 
Devil,” speaks of “ a lousy knave, that within these twenty 
years rode with the ‘ black guard 1 in the Duke’s carriage, 
amongst spits and dripping-pans.” “ Artillery,” which to¬ 
day means the heavy ordnance of modern warfare, was two 
or three centuries ago applied to any engines for throwing 
missiles, even to the bow and arrow. “ Punctual,” which 
now denotes exactness in keeping engagements, formerly 
applied to space as well as to time. Sir Thomas Browne 
speaks of “ a ‘ punctual ’ truth ” ; and we read in other 
writers of “a ‘ punctual’ relation,” or “ description,” 
meaning a particular or circumstantial relation or descrip¬ 
tion. 

“ Bombast,” now swelling talk, inflated diction without 
substance, was originally cotton padding. It is derived 
from the Low Latin, bombax , cotton. “Chemist” once 
meant the same as alchemist. “ Polite ” originally meant 
polished. Cud worth speaks of “polite bodies, as looking- 
glasses.” “Tidy,” which now means neat, well arranged, 
is derived from the old English word “ tide,” meaning time, 
as in eventide. “ Tidy ” (German, zeitig ) is timely, seasona¬ 
ble. As things in right time are apt to be in the right 
place, the transition in the meaning of the word is a natu¬ 
ral one. “ Caitiff ” formerly meant captive, being derived 
from captivus through the Norman-French. The change of 
signification points to the tendency of slavery utterly to 
debase the character,— to transform the man into a cow¬ 
ardly miscreant. In like manner “ miscreant,” once simply 
a misbeliever, and applied to the most virtuous as well as 
to the vilest, points to the deep-felt conviction that a wrong 
belief leads to wrong living. Thus Gibbon: “The emper- 


380 


words; their use and abuse. 


or’s generosity to the ‘ miscreant ’ [ Soliman ] was inter¬ 
preted as treason to the Christian cause.” “ Thought,” in 
early English, was anxious care; e.g., “ Take no ‘ thought’ 
for your life’’(Matt, vi, 25). “Thing” primarily meant 
discourse, then solemn discussion, council, court of justice, 
cause, matter or subject of discourse. The “ husting ” was 
originally the house-tiling, or domestic court. 

“ Coquets ” were once male as well as female. “ Usury,” 
which now means taking illegal or excessive interest, 
denoted, at first, the taking of any interest, however small. 
A “ tobacconist ” was formerly a smoker, not a seller, of 
tobacco. “ Corpse,” now a body from which the breath of 
life has departed, once denoted the body of the living also; 
as in Surrey, 

“A valiant corpse, where force and beauty met.” 

We have already spoken of the striking change which the 
word “incomprehensible” has undergone within the last 
three centuries. 

“Wit,” now used in a more limited sense, at first signi¬ 
fied the mental powers collectively; e.g., “Will puts in 
practice what the wit deviseth.” Later it came to denote 
quickness of apprehension, beauty or elegance in composi¬ 
tion, and Pope defined it as 

“Nature to advantage dressed, 

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” 

Another meaning was a man of talents or genius. The 
word “parts,” a hundred years ago, was used to denote 
genius or talents. Horace Walpole, in one of his letters, 
says of Goldsmith that “ he was an idiot, with once or 
twice a fit of ‘parts.’” The word “loyalty” has under¬ 
gone a marked change within a few centuries. Originally 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


381 


it meant in English, as in French, fair dealing, fidelity to 
engagements; now it means, in England, fidelity to the 
throne, and, in the United States, to the Union or the 
Constitution. “Relevant,” which formerly meant reliev¬ 
ing or assisting, is now used in the sense of “ relative ” or 
“ relating ” to, with which, from a similarity of sound, 
though without the least etymological connection, it ap¬ 
pears to have been confounded. The word “exorbitant” 
once meant deviating from a track or orbit; it is now 
used exclusively in the sense of excessive. 

The word “coincide” was primarily a mathematical 
term. If one mathematical point be superposed upon an¬ 
other, or one straight line upon another between the same 
two points, the two points in the first case and the two 
lines in the latter are said to coincide. The word was soon 
applied figuratively to identity of opinion, but, according 
to Prof. Marsh, was not fully popularized, at least in 
America, till 1826. On the Fourth of July in that year, 
the semi-centennial jubilee of the Declaration of Independ¬ 
ence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that manifesto, and 
John Adams, its principal champion on the floor of Con¬ 
gress, both also Ex-Presidents, died; and this fact was 
noticed all over the world, and especially in the United 
States, as a remarkable “ coincidence.” The death of Ex- 
President Monroe, also, on the Fourth of July five years 
after, gave increased currency to the word. Our late civil 
war has led to some striking mutations in the meaning 
of words. “Contraband,” from its general signification of 
any article whose importation or exportation is prohib¬ 
ited by law, became limited to a fugitive slave within the 
United States’ military lines. “Secede” and “secession,” 


382 


words; their use and abuse. 


“ confederate” and “ confederacy,” have also acquired new 
special meanings. 


DEGRADATION OF WORDS. 

Another striking characteristic of words is their ten¬ 
dency to contract in form and degenerate in meaning. 
Sometimes they are ennobled and purified in signification; 
but more frequently they deteriorate, and from an hon¬ 
orable fall into a dishonorable meaning. I will first 
note a few examples of the former:—“Humility,” with the 
Greeks and Romans, meant meanness of spirit; “Paradise,” 
in oriental tongues, meant only a royal park; “ regenera¬ 
tion ” was spoken by the Greeks only of the earth in the 
springtime, and of the recollection of forgotten knowledge; 
“ sacrament ” and “ mystery ” are words “ fetched from the 
very dregs of paganism ” to set forth the great truths of 
our redemption. On the other hand, “thief” (Anglo- 
Saxon, theow) formerly signified only one of the servile 
classes; and “villain” or “ villein,” meant peasant,— the 
serf who, under the feudal system, was adscriptus glebce. 
The scorn of the landholders, the half-barbarous aristoc¬ 
racy, for these persons, led them to ascribe to them the 
most hateful qualities, some of which their degrading situ¬ 
ation doubtless tended to foster. Thus the word “ villein ” 
became gradually associated with ideas of crime and guilt, 
till at length it became a synonym for knaves of every 
class in society. A “menial” was one of the many; 
“insolent” meant unusual; “silly,” blessed,— the infant 
Jesus being termed by an old English poet “that harmless 
‘ silly ’ babe ”; “ officious ” signified ready to do kindly 
offices. “ Demure ” was used once in a good sense, with- 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


383 


out the insinuation which is now almost latent in it, that 
the external shows of modesty and sobriety rest on no cor¬ 
responding realities. “Facetious,” which now has the 
sense of buffoonish, originally meant urbane. “ Idiot,” 
from the Greek, originally signified only a private man, as 
distinguished from an office-holder. “ Homely ” formerly 
meant secret and familiar; and “brat,” now a vulgar and 
contemptuous word, had anciently a very different signifi¬ 
cation, as in the following lines from an old hymn by 
Gascoigne: 

“ O Israel, O household of the Lori, 

O Abraham’s brats, O brood of blessed seed, 

O chosen sheep that loved the Lord indeed." 

“Imp” once meant graft; Bacon speaks of “those most 
virtuous and goodly young imps, the Duke of Sussex and 
his brother.” A “boor” was once only a farmer; a 
“scamp ” a camp deserter. “Speculation ” first meant the 
sense of sight; as in Shakespeare: 

“Thou hast no speculation in those eyes.” 

Next it was metaphorically transferred to mental vision, 
and finally denoted, without a metaphor, the reflections 
and theories of philosophers. From the domain of philoso¬ 
phy it has finally travelled downward to the offices of stock¬ 
jobbers, share-brokers, and all men who get their living by 
their wits, instead of by the sweat of their brows. So 
“ craft ” at first meant ability, skill, or dexterity. The 
origin of the term, according to Wedgewood, is seen in the 
notion of seizing, expressed by the Italian, graffiare , Welsh, 
craff, a hook, brace, holdfast. The term is then applied to 
seizing with the mind, as in the Latin term “ apprehend,” 
“ comprehend,” from prehendere , to seize in a material way. 


384 


words; their use and abuse. 


“Cunning” once conveyed no idea of sinister or crooked 
wisdom. “ The three Persons of the Trinity,” says a rever¬ 
ent writer of the fifteenth century, “ are of equal cunning.” 
Bacon, a century later, uses the word in its present sense of 
fox-like wisdom; and Locke calls it “ the ape of wisdom.” 
“Vagabond” is a word whose etymology conveys no re¬ 
proach. It denoted at first only a wanderer. But as men 
who have no homes are apt to become loose, unsteady, and 
reckless in their habits, the term has degenerated into its 
present signification. 

“Paramour” meant originally only lover; a “minion” 
was a favorite; and “ knave,” the lowest and most contempt¬ 
uous term we can use when insulting another, signified 
originally, as knabe still does in German, a boy. Subse¬ 
quently, it meant servant; thus Paul, in Wicliffe’s ver¬ 
sion of the New Testament, reverently terms himself “ a 
‘knave’ of Jesus Christ.” A similar parallel to this is the 
word “ varlet,” which is the same as “ valet.” “ Retaliate,” 
from the Latin re (back) and talis (such), naturally means 
to pay back in kind, or such as we have received. But as, 
according to Sir Thomas More, men write their injuries in 
marble, the kindnesses done them in sand, the word “ retal¬ 
iate” is applied only to offences or indignities, and never to 
favors. The word “ resent,” to feel in return, has under¬ 
gone a similar deterioration. A Frenchman would say, “ II 
4 ressentit ’ une vive douleur ,” for “He felt acute pain”; 
whereas we use the word only to express the sentiment of 
anger. 

So “ animosity,” which etymologically means only spirit¬ 
edness, is now applied to only one kind of vigor and activity, 
that displayed in enmity and hate. “ Defalcation,” from 
the Latin, falx , a sickle or scythe, is properly a cutting off 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


385 


or down, a pruning or retrenchment. Thus Addison: “The 
tea-table is set forth with its usual bill of fare, and with¬ 
out any defalcation/’ To-day we read of a “defalcation in 
the revenue,” or “ in a treasurer’s accounts,” by which is 
meant a decrease in the amount of the revenue, or in the 
moneys accounted for, irrespective of the cause,— a falling 
off. This erroneous use of the word is probably due to a 
confusion of it with the expression “fall away,” and with 
the noun “defaulter.” Between the first word and either of 
the last two, however, there is not the slightest etymologi¬ 
cal relationship. “ Chaffer,” to talk much and idly, prima¬ 
rily meant to buy, to make a bargain, to higgle or dispute 
about a bargain. “Gossip” (God-akin) once meant a 
sponsor in baptism. “Simple” and “simplicity” have 
sadly degenerated in meaning. A “ simple ” fellow, once 
a man sine ‘plica (without fold, free from duplicity), is 
now one who lacks shrewdness, and is easily cheated or 
duped. 

There are some words which, though not used in an 
absolutely unfavorable sense, yet require a qualifying 
adjective to be understood favorably. Thus, if a man is 
said to be noted for his “ curiosity,” a prying, impertinent, 
not a legitimate, curiosity is supposed to be meant. So 
“critic” and “criticise” are commonly associated with a 
carping, fault-finding spirit. “Lust” has undergone a 
signal deterioration. In Chaucer it is used both as a noun 
and a verb, and signifies wish, desire, pleasure, enjoyment, 
without any evil connotation. “Parson” (persona eccle- 
sice) had originally no undertone of contempt. In the 
eighteenth century it had become a nickname of scorn; and 
it was at a part}^ of a dozen parsons that the Earl of Sand¬ 
wich won his wager, that no one among them had brought 


386 


words; their use and abuse. 


his prayer-book or forgotten his corkscrew. “ Fellow ” was 
originally a term of respect,— at least, there was in it no 
subaudition of contempt; now it is suggestive of worthless¬ 
ness, if not of positively bad morals. Shakespeare did not 
mean to disparage Yorick, the jester, when he said that “ he 
was a ‘fellow’ of infinite jest”; Pope, on the other hand, 
tells us, a century or more later, that 

“Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow .” 

“ By a ‘ fast’ man, I presume you mean a ‘ loose’ one,” 
said Sir Robert Inglis to one who was describing a rake. 
Of all the words which have degenerated from their origi¬ 
nal meaning, the most remarkable is the term “ dunce,” of 
the history of which Archbishop Trench has given a strik¬ 
ing account in his work on “ The Study of Words.” In the 
Middle Ages certain theologians, educated in the cathedral 
and cloister schools founded by Charlemagne and his suc¬ 
cessors, were called Schoolmen. Though they were men of 
great acuteness and subtlety of intellect, their works, at the 
revival of learning, ceased to be popular, and it was consid¬ 
ered a mark of intellectual progress and advance to have 
thrown off their yoke. Some persons, however, still clung 
to these Schoolmen, especially to Duns Scotus, the great 
teacher of the Franciscan order: and many times an adher¬ 
ent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his 
position by an appeal to its great doctor, familiarly called 
Duns; while his opponents would contemptuously rejoin, 
“ Oh, you are a ‘ Duns-man,’ ” or, more briefly, “You are a 
‘ Duns.’ ” As the new learning was enlisting more and 
more of the scholarship of the age on its side, the title 
became more and more a term of scorn; and thus, from 
that long extinct conflict between the old and the new 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


387 


learning, the mediaeval and the modern theology, we inherit 
the words “ dunce ” and “ duncery.” The lot of poor Duns, 
as the Archbishop observes, was certainly a hard one. That 
the name of “ the Subtle Doctor,” as he was called, one of 
the keenest and most subtle-witted of men,— according to 
Hooker, “the wittiest of the school divines,”—should 
become a synonym for stupidity and obstinate dulness, was 
a fate of which even his bitterest enemies could never have 
dreamed. 

COMMON WORDS WITH CURIOUS DERIVATIONS. 

“ Bit ” is that which has been bit off, and exactly corre¬ 
sponds to the word “ morsel,” used in the same sense, and 
derived from the Latin, mordere , to bite. “ Bankrupt ” means 
literally broken bench. It was the custom in the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries for the Lombard merchants to 
expose their wares for sale in the market-place on benches. 
When one of their number failed, all the other merchants 
set upon him, drove him from the market, and “broke” his 
“ bench ” to pieces. Banco rotto, the Italian for bench-broken, 
becomes banqueroute in French, and in English “ bankrupt.” 
To the Lombard merchants, who flocked to England in 
the thirteenth century, we owe also the words “ bank,” 
“ debtor,” “ creditor,” “ usance ” (the old word for interest), 
“journal,” “diary,” “ledger,” “ditto,” and “£. s. d.,” 
which derives its origin from Lire , Soldi , and Denari. “ Alli¬ 
gator ” is from the Spanish el lagarto, the lizard, being 
the largest of the lizard species. “ Stipulation ” is from 
stipulum , a straw, which the Romans broke when they made 
a mutual engagement. “Dexterity” is simply righthanded- 
ness. “ Mountebank ” means a quack-medicine vendor,— 
from the Italian montare , to mount, and banco , a bench; 


388 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


literally, one who mounts a bench to boast of his infallible 
skill in curing diseases. “Quandary” is a corruption of the 
French, qu'en dirai ( je )? “what shall I say of it?”—and 
expresses that feeling of uncertainty which would naturally 
prompt such a question. “ Faint ” is from the French, se 
feindre, to pretend; so that originally fainting was a 
pretended weakness or inability. We have an example of 
the thing originally indicated by the word, in the French 
theatres, where professional fainters are employed, whose 
business it is to be overcome and to sink to the floor under 
the powerful acting of the tragedians. 

“ Topsy-turvy ” is said to be a contraction or corruption 
of “ top-side t’other way.” “ Helter-skelter ” is either from 
hilariter et celeriter, “gaily and quickly,” or, more probably, 
from helter, to hang, and skelter , order, i.e., “ hang order.” 
“Hip! hip! hurrah!” is said to have been originally a war- 
cry adopted by the stormers of a German town, wherein 
a great many Jews had taken refuge. The place being 
sacked, the Jews were all put to the sword, amid the 
shouts of “ Hierosolyma est perdita!” From the first letters 
of these words (h. e. p.) an exclamation was contrived. 
When the wine sparkles in the cup, and patriotic or other 
soul-thrilling sentiments are greeted with a “Hip! hip! 
hurrah!” it is well enough to remember the origin of a 
cry which reminds us of the cruelty of Christians toward 
God’s chosen people. “ Sexton ” is a corruption of “ sacris¬ 
tan,” which is from sacra , the sacred things of a church. The 
sacristan’s office was to take care of the vessels of the 
service and the vestments of the clergy. Since the 
Reformation, his duties in this respect have been greatly 
lessened, and he has dug the graves,— so that the term 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


389 


now commonly means grave-digger, though it still retains 
somewhat of its old meaning. 

“ Toad-eater ” is a metaphor supposed to be taken from 
a mountebank’s boy eating toads, in order to show his 
master’s skill in expelling poison. It is more probable, 
however, that the phrase is a version of the French, avaler 
des couleuvres, which means putting up with all sorts of 
indignities without showing resentment. The propriety 
of the term rests on the fact that dependent persons are 
often forced to do the most nauseous things to please their 
patrons. The same trick of pretending to eat reptiles, 
such as toads, is held by some etymologists to be the origin 
of the terms “buffoon,” “buffoonery,” from the Latin, bufo , 
a toad. Wedgwood derives it from the French, bouffon , a 
jester, from the Italian, buff a, a puff, a blast or a blurt 
with the mouth made at one in scorn. A puff with the 
mouth indicates contempt; it is emblematically making 
light of an object. In “David Copperfield” we read: 
“ ‘ And who minds Dick? Dick’s nobody! Whoo! ’ He blew 
a slight, contemptuous breath, as if he blew himself 
away.” 

“Cant” (Gaelic, cainnt , speech) is properly the language 
spoken by thieves and beggars among themselves, when 
they do not wish to be understood by bystanders. Sub¬ 
sequently it came to mean the peculiar terms used by any 
other profession or community. Some etymologists derive 
the word from the Latin, cantare , to sing, and suppose it to 
signify the whining cry of professional beggars, though it 
may have obtained its beggar sense from some instinctive 
notion of the quasi-religious one. It has been noted that 
the whole class of words comprising “enchant,” “incanta¬ 
tion,” etc., were primarily referable to religious ceremonies 


390 


words; their use and abuse. 


of some kind; and as once an important part of a beggar’s 
daily labor was invoking, or seeming to invoke, blessings 
on those who gave him alms, this, with the natural ten¬ 
dency to utter any oft-repeated phrases in a sing-song, 
rhythmical tone, gave to the word “cant” its present sig¬ 
nification. In Scotland the word has a peculiar meaning. 
About the middle of the seventeenth century, Andrew and 
Alexander Cant, of Edinburgh, maintained that all refusers 
of the covenant ought to be excommunicated, and that all 
excommunicated might lawfully be killed; and in their 
grace after meat they “ praid for those phanaticques and 
seditious ministers” who had been arrested and impris¬ 
oned, that the Lord would pity and deliver them. From 
these two Cants, Andrew and Alexander, it is said, all 
seditious praying and preaching in Scotland is called 
“ Canting.” 

The tendency to regard money as the source of true 
happiness is strikingly illustrated in the word “ wealth,” 
which is connected with “ weal,” just as in Latin beatus 
meant both blessed and rich, and the same in Greek. 

“Property” and “propriety” come from the same French 
word, propriete ; so that the Frenchman in New York was 
not far out of the way, when in the panic of 1857 he 
said he “should lose all his propriety .” The term “blue¬ 
stocking,” applied to literary ladies, has a curious origin. 
Originally, in England in 1760, it was conferred on a 
society of literary persons of both sexes. The society 
derived its name from the blue worsted stockings always 
worn by Benjamin Stillingfleet, a distinguished writer, who 
was one of the most active promoters of this association. 
This term was subsequently conferred on literary ladies, 
from the fact that the accomplished and fascinating Mrs. 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


391 


Jerningham wore blue stockings at the social and literary 
entertainments given by Lady Montague. “Woman” is 
the ivif or iveb-m an, who stays at home to spin, as distin¬ 
guished from the weap- man, who goes abroad to use the 
weapon of war. The term “man” is, of course, generic, 
including both male and female. “Lady” primarily sig¬ 
nifies bread keeper. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, 
hlcefdige, i.e., she who looks after the loaf; or else is a 
corruption of hldfweardige, from hldf, bread, loaf, and 
weardian , to keep, look after. “Waist” is the same as 
waste; that part of the figure which wastes,— that is, 
diminishes. 

“Canard” has a very curious origin. M. Quetelet, a 
French writer, in the “Annuaire de l’Acaddmie Fran- 
qaise,” attributes the first application of this term to 
Norbert Cornel i'ssen, who, to give a sly hit at the ridicu¬ 
lous pieces of intelligence in the public journals, stated 
that an interesting experiment had just been made cal¬ 
culated to prove the voracity of ducks. Twenty were 
placed together; and one of them having been killed and 
cut up into the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, 
was thrown to the other nineteen, and most gluttonously 
gobbled up. Another was then taken from the nineteen, 
and, being chopped small like its predecessor, was served 
up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; 
and so on to the last, who thus was placed in the position 
of having eaten his nineteen companions. This story, 
most pleasantly narrated, ran the round of all the jour¬ 
nals of Europe. It then became almost forgotten for 
about a score of years, when it -went back from America 
with amplifications; but the word remained in its novel 
signification. 


392 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


“ Abominable ” was once supposed to have been derived 
from the Latin words ab , from, and homo , a man, mean¬ 
ing repugnant to humanity. It really comes from abomi- 
nor, which again is from ab and omen ; and it conveys the 
idea of what is in a religious sense profane and detestable, 
— in short, of evil omen. Milton always applies it to 
devilish, profane, or idolatrous objects. “Poltroon” is 
pollice truncus , i.e., with the thumb cut off,— pollex, Latin, 
meaning thumb, and truncus, maimed or mutilated. When 
the Roman empire was about falling in pieces, the valor 
of the citizens had so degenerated, that, to escape fighting, 
many cut off their right thumbs, thus disabling themselves 
from using the pike. “Farce” is derived from farcire , 
a Latin word meaning to stuff, as with flour, herbs, and 
other ingredients in cooking. A farce is a comedy with 
little plot, stuffed with ludicrous incidents and expressions. 
“Racy” is from “race,” meaning family, breed, and signi¬ 
fies having the characteristic flavor of origin, savoring of 
the source. 

“ Trivial ” may be from trivium, in the sense of tres vice , 
a place where three roads meet, and thus indicate that 
which is commonplace, or of daily occurence. But it is 
more probably from trivium , in the sense in which the 
word was used in the Middle Ages, when it meant the 
course of three arts, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which 
formed the common curriculum of the universities, as dis¬ 
tinguished from the quadrivium, which embraced four 
more, namely, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. 
Trivial things in this sense may mean things that occur 
ordinarily, as distinguished from higher or more abstruse 
things. The word “quiz” has a remarkable origin, unless 
the etymologists who give its derivation are themselves 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


393 


quizzing their readers. It is said that many years ago, 
when one Daly was patentee of the Irish theatres, he 
spent the evening of a Saturday in company with many 
of the wits and men of fashion of the day. Gambling 
was introduced, when the manager staked a large sum 
that he would have spoken, all through the principal 
streets of Dublin, by a certain hour next day, Sunday, a 
word having no meaning, and being derived from no 
known language. Wagers were laid, and stakes depos¬ 
ited. Daly repaired to the theatre, and dispatched all 
the servants and supernumeraries with the word “ Quiz,” 
which they chalked on every door and every shop window 
in town. Shops being all shut next day, everybody going 
to and coming from the different places of worship saw 
the word, and everybody repeated it, so that “ Quiz ” was 
heard all through Dublin; the circumstance of so strange 
a word being on every door and window caused much 
surprise, and ever since, should a strange story be at¬ 
tempted to be passed current, it draws forth the expres¬ 
sion “You are ‘quizzing’ me.” Some person who has a 
just aversion to practical jokes, wittily defines a “quizzer” 
as “ one who believes me to be a fool because I will not 
believe him to be a liar.” 

“Huguenot” is a word whose origin is still a vexata 
queestio of etymology. Of the many derivations given, 
some of which are ridiculously fanciful, Eignots, which 
Voltaire and others give from the German, Eidgenossen, 
confederates, is the one generally received. A plausible 
derivation is from Huguenot , a small piece of money, 
which, in the time of Hugo Capet, was worth less than a 
denier. At the time of Amboisi’s conspiracy, some of the 
petitioners fled through fear; whereupon some of the 


394 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


countrymen said they were poor fellows, not worth a 
Huguenot,— whence the nickname in question. “Pen¬ 
sive” is a picturesque word, from pensare , the fre¬ 
quentative of pendere , to weigh. The French have pensee , 
a thought, the result of mental weighing. A pensive 
figure is that in which a person appears to he holding 
an invisible balance of reflection. “ Bumper ” is a cor¬ 
ruption of le bon phre, meaning “the Holy Father,” or 
Pope, who was once the great toast of every feast. 
As this was commonly the first toast, it was consid¬ 
ered that the glasses would be desecrated by being again 
used. 

“ Nice ” is derived by some etymologists from the An¬ 
glo-Saxon, hnesc , soft, effeminate; but there is good reason 
for believing that it is from the Latin, nescius , ignorant, 
“Wise, and nothing nice,” says Chaucer; that is, no wise 
ignorant. If so, it is a curious instance of the extraor¬ 
dinary changes of meaning which words undergo, that 
“ nice ” should come to signify accurate or fastidious, which 
implies knowledge and taste rather than ignorance. The 
explanation is, that the diffidence of ignorance resembles 
the fastidious slowness of discernment. “ Gibberish ” is 
from a famous sage, Giber, an Arab, who sought for the 
philosopher’s stone, and used, perhaps, senseless incanta¬ 
tions. “ Alert ” is a picturesque word from the Italian, 
all ’ erte ,— on the mound or rampart. The “ alert ” man 
is one who is wide-awake and watchful, like the warder on 
the watch-tower, or the sentinel upon the rampart. “ By¬ 
laws ” are not, etymologically, laws of inferior importance, 
but the laws of “ byes ” or towns, as distinguished from 
the general laws of a kingdom. “ By ” is Danish for town 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


395 


or village; as “Whitby,” White Town, “Derby,” Deer 
Town, etc, 

A writer in “Notes and Queries” suggests that the 
word “snobs” may be of classical origin, derived from 
sine obola , without a penny. It is not probable, however, 
that it was meant as a sneer at poverty only. A more 
ingenious suggestion is that, as the higher classes were 
called “nobs,”— i.e., nobilitas , the nobility,— the “ s-nobs ” 
were those sine nobilitate, without any blue blood in their 
veins, or pure aristocratic breeding. “ Humbug ” is an 
expressive word, about the origin of which etymologists 
are disagreed. An ingenious explanation, not given in the 
dictionaries, is, that it is derived from “ Hume of the Bog,” 
a Scotch laird, so called from his estate, who lived during 
the reign of William and Anne. He was celebrated in 
Edinburgh circles for his marvellous stories, which, in the 
exhausting draughts they made on his hearer’s credulity, 
out-Munchausened Munchausen. Hence, any tough story 
was called “ a regular Hume of the Bog,” or, by contrac¬ 
tion, “ Humbug.” Another etymology of “ humbug ” is a 
piece of Hamburg news; i.e., a Stock Exchange canard. 
Webster derives the word from “ hum,” to impose on, de¬ 
ceive, and “bug” a frightful object, a bugbear. Wedg¬ 
wood thinks it may come from the union of “ hum ” and 
“ buzz,” signifying sound without sense. He cites a catch, 
set by Dr. Arne in “ Notes and Queries”: 

“ ‘Buzz,’ quoth the blue fly, 

‘ Hum,’ quoth the bee, 

‘Buzz’ and ‘hum’ they cry, 

And so do we. ” 

“ Imbecile ” is from the Latin, in and bacillum, a walk¬ 
ing stick; one who through infirmity leans for support 


396 


words; their use and abuse. 


upon a stick. “ Petrels ” are little Peters, because, like 
the apostles, they can walk on the water. “ Hocus pocus ” 
is a corruption of Hoc est corpus , “ this is the body,” words 
once used in necromancy or jugglery. “Chagrin” is pri¬ 
marily a hard, granulated leather, which chafes the limbs; 
hence, secondarily, irritation or vexation. “ Canon ” is 
from a Greek word meaning “cane”; first a hollow rule 
or a cane used as a measure, then a law or rule. The 
word is identical with “ cannon,” so called from its hollow, 
tube-like form. Hence it has been wittily said that the 
world in the Middle Ages was governed first by canons, 
and then by cannons,— first, by Saint Peter, and then by 
saltpetre. 

“ Booby ” primarily denotes a person who gapes and 
stares about, wondering at everything. From the syllable 
“ ba,” representing the opening of the mouth, are formed 
the French words baier, beer, to gape, and thence in the 
patois of the Hainault, baia, the mouth, and figuratively 
one who stands staring with open mouth, boubie. Webster 
thinks the word is derived from the French, boubie, a water- 
fowl. “ Pet,” a darling, is from the French, petit, which 
comes from the Latin, petitus, sought after. “ My pet ” 
means literally “ my sought after or desired one.” “ Petty” 
is also from the French, petit, little. “ Assassin” is derived 
from the Persian, hashish, an intoxicating opiate. “ The 
Assassins” were a tribe of fanatics, who lived in the 
mountains of Lebanon, and executed with terror and 
subtlety every order entrusted to them by their chief, the 
“ Old Man of the Mountain.” They made a jest of tor¬ 
ture when seized, and were the terror alike of Turk and 
Christian. They resembled the Thugs of India. “ Blun¬ 
derbuss ” (properly thunder-buss) is from the German 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


397 


btichse, applied to a rifle, a box; hence “ arquebuss ” and 
“ Brown Bess.” “ Bosh ” is derived, according to some 
etymologists, from a Turkish word meaning “ empty,”— 
according to others, from the German, bosse , a joke or 
trifle. Mr. Blackley, in his “ Word-Gossip,” says it is the 
pure gypsy word for “ fiddle,” which suggests the semi- 
sanctioned “fiddle-de-dee!” “Person” primarily meant 
an actor. The Roman theatres, which could hold thirty 
to forty thousand spectators, were so large that the actors 
wore masks containing a contrivance to render the voice 
louder. Such a mask was called persona (per sonare , to 
sound through), because the voice sounded through it. By 
a common figure of speech, the word meaning “mask” 
{persona) was afterward applied to its wearer; so persona 
came to signify “ actor.” But as all men are actors, play¬ 
ing each his part on the stage of life, the word “ person ” 
came afterward to signify a man or woman. “ Parson ” 
the “ chief person ” of a parish, is another form of the 
same word. “ Curmudgeon ” is probably from “ corn- 
merchant,” one who tries to enrich himself by hoard¬ 
ing grain and withholding it from others ; or it may 
be from the French, coeur , the heart, and mechant, 
wicked. “ Haberdasher ” is from the German, Habt 
ihr das hier ? i.e., Have you this here? “Hoax” is 
from the Anglo-Saxon, huso, mockery or contempt; or, 
perhaps it is from “ hocuspocus,” which was at one time 
used to ridicule the Roman Catholic doctrine of transub- 
stantiation. 

“Right” is from the Latin rectus , ruled, proceeding in a 
straight line; “ wrong ” is the perfect participle of “ wring,” 
that which has been “wrung” or wrested from the right; 
just as in French tort is from torqueo, that which is twisted. 


398 


words; their use and abuse. 


“ Humble-pie ” is properly “ umble-pie.” The umbles were 
the entrails or coarser parts of the deer, the perquisite of 
the keeper or huntsman. “ Pantaloon ” is from the Italian, 
piante leone ( panta-leone, pantaloon ), “ the Planter of the 
Lion”; i.e., the Standard-Bearer of Venice. The Lion 
of St. Mark was the standard of Venice. “ Pantaloon ” was 
a masked character in the Italian comedy, the butt of the 
play, who wore breeches and stockings that were all of one 
piece. The Spanish language has panalon , a slovenly fellow 
whose shirt hangs out of his breeches. “ Cheat ” is from 
the Latin, cadere , to fall. The word “ escheats ” first de¬ 
noted lands that “ fell ” to the crown by forfeiture. The 
“ escheatours,” who certified these to the Exchequer, prac¬ 
tised so much fraud, that, by a natural transition, the “ es- 
eheatour ” passed into “ cheater,” and “ escheat ” into 
“ cheat.” 

“ Salary ” is from the Latin, sal, salt, which in the 
reign of the Emperor Augustus comprised the provisions, as 
well as the pay, of the Roman military officers. From 
“ salary ” came, probably, the expression, “ He is not worth 
his ‘ salt,’ ” that is, his pay or wages. “ Kidnap ” is from the 
German kind, or Provincial English, kid, meaning “ child,” 
and nap or nab, “ to steal,”— to steal children. “ Hawk,” 
in Anglo-Saxon, hafoc, points to the havoc which that bird 
makes among the smaller ones; as “ raven ” expresses the 
greedy or “ravenous” disposition of the bird so named. 
“ Owl ” is said to be the past participle of “ to yell ” (as in 
Latin ulula, the screech-owl, is from ululare), and differs 
from “ howl ” only in its spelling. “ Solecism ” is from Soli, 
a town of Cilicia, the people of which corrupted the pure 
Greek. “ Squirrel ” is from two Greek words, <rvda, a shade, 
and ovpa , a tail. “ Sycophant ” is primarily a “ fig-shower ”; 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


399 


one who informed the public officers of Attica that the law 
against the exportation of figs had been violated. Hence 
the word came to mean a common informer, a mean 
parasite. “ Parasite,” from the Greek napa, beside, and 
<r7ro<?, food, means literally one who eats at the table of 
another,— a privilege which is apt to be paid for by 
obsequiousness and flattery. 

“ Sarcasm,” from the Greek, <rdp$ y flesh, and xd C<o, I tear, is 
literally a tearing of the flesh. “ Tribulation ” is from the 
Latin tribulum , a kind of sledge or heavy roller, which did 
the work of the English flail, by hard grinding and wearing, 
instead of by repeated light strokes. Troubles, afflictions 
and sorrows being the divinely appointed means for sepa¬ 
rating the chaff from the wheat of men's natures,— the 
light and trivial from the solid and valuable,— the early 
Christians, by a rustic but familiar metaphor, called these 
sorrows and trials “ tribulations,” threshings of the inner 
spiritual man, by which only could he be fitted for the 
heavenly garner. As Wither beautifully sings: 

“Till the mill the grains in pieces tear, 

The richness of the flour will scarce appear; 

So till men’s persons great afflictions touch, 

If worth be found, their worth is not much; 

Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
That value, which in threshing they may get.” 

“ Tabby,” a familiar name of cats, is the French tabis, 
which comes from the Persian retabi, a rich watered silk, 
and denotes the wavy bars upon their coats. “ Schooner ” 
has a curious derivation. In 1713 Captain Andrew Robin¬ 
son launched the first vessel of this kind, with gaffs instead 
of the lateen yards until then in use, and the luff of the sail 
bent to hoops on the mast. As she slipped down the ways 
a bystander exclaimed, “Ob, how she ‘scoons’!”—where- 


400 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


upon the builder, catching at the word, replied, “ A 
‘ scooner ’ let her be!” Originally the word was spelled 
without the h. “ Supercilious,” from supercilium , the eye¬ 
brow, is literally knitting the eyebrows in pride. “ Slave ” 
chronicles the contest between the Teutonic and Sclavonic 
or Slavonic races. When a German captured a Russian or 
Bohemian, he would call him a “ sclave” or “ slave,” whereby 
the word became associated with the idea of servitude. In 
Oriental France, in the eighth century, princes and bishops 
were rich in these captives. 

“ Servant ” is from servus, which the Justinian code 
derives from servare , to preserve,— because the victor pre¬ 
served his captives alive, instead of killing them. 

“Scrupulous” is from the Latin, scrupiilus , a small, 
sharp stone, such as might get into a Roman traveller’s 
open shoe, and distress him, whence the further meaning 
of doubts, or a source of doubt and hesitation. Afterward 
the word came to express a measure of weight, the twenty- 
fourth part of an ounce; and hence to be scrupulous is 
to pay minute, nice, and exact attention to matters often in 
themselves of small weight. “Plagiarism” is literally 
“ man-stealing.” As books are one’s mental offspring, the 
word came naturally to mean, first, the stealing of a book 
or manuscript which the thief published as his own; sec¬ 
ondly, quoting from another man’s writings without 
acknowledgment. “ Parlor,” from parler, to speak, is, 
therefore, the “ talking room,” as “ boudoir,” from bonder , to 
pout, is literally the “pouting-room.” “ Egregious ” is from 
the Latin ex , from, and grege, flock or herd. An “ egre¬ 
gious” lie is one distinguished from the common herd of 
lies, such as one meets with in every patent-medicine 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


401 


advertisement and political newspaper. “Negotiate” is 
from negotior , compounded of ne ego otior , I am not idle. 

The origin of the word “caucus” has long been a vexed 
question with etymologists. Till recently it was supposed 
by many to be a corruption of “ caulkers,” being derived 
from an association of these men in Boston, who met to 
organize resistance to England just before the revolu¬ 
tionary war. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, 
Connecticut, has suggested a new and ingenious derivation 
of the term, which is more satisfactory, and probably 
correct. Strachey, in his “ Historie of Travaile into Vir¬ 
ginia,” 1610-12 (printed by the Hakluyt Society, 1849), 
says that the Chechahamanias, a free people, acknowledg¬ 
ing the supremacy of Powhatan, were governed, not by a 
weroance , commander, sent by Powhatan, but by their 
priests, with the assistance of their elders; and this board 
was called cawcawivas. Captain John Smith writes cocke- 
rouse for cawcawtvas, in the sense of “captain”; but the En¬ 
glish generally understood it in the sense of “counsellor,” 
and adopted it from the Indians, as Beverley states that it 
designates “ one that has the honor to be of the king’s or 
queen’s council,” a provincial councillor, just as northern 
politicians now use the word sachem , and formerly used 
mugwomp. The verb from which caivcawwas, or cocke- 
rouse comes, means primarily “ to talk to,”— hence to 
“harangue,” “advise,” “encourage,” and is found in all 
Algonquin dialects, as Abnaki kakesoo , to incite, and Chip- 
peway gaganso (n nasal), to exhort, urge, counsel. Caw- 
cawwas, representing the adjective form of this verb, is 
“one who advises, promotes,”—a caucuser. “Manumit” 
is from manus , hand, and mittere, to dismiss,— to dismiss 
a slave with a slap of the hand, on setting him free. 


402 


words; their use and abuse. 


“Hypocrite” comes from a Greek word signifying one who 
feigns or plays a part on the stage. “ Kennel,” a dog 
house, is from the Italian, canile, and this from the Latin, 
canis , a dog. “ Kennel,” in the sense of gutter, with its 
kindred words, “can,” “cane,” and “channel,” is derived 
from canna , a cane, which is like a tube. 

“Apple-pie order” is a popular phrase of which few 
persons know the meaning. Does it signify in order, or 
in disorder? A writer in the “North British Review” 
favors the latter interpretation. He thinks it has nothing 
to do with “apple” or “pie,” in the common sense of those 
words. He believes that it is a typographical term, and 
that it was originally “Chapel pie.” A printing house 
was, and is to this day, called a chapel,— perhaps from the 
Chapel at Westminster Abbey, in which Caxton’s earliest 
works are said to have been printed; and “pie” is type 
after it is “distributed” or broken up, and before it has 
been re-sorted. “ ‘ Pie ’ in this sense came from the con¬ 
fused and perplexing rules of the ‘ Pie,' that is, the order for 
finding the lessons, in Catholic times, which those who have 
read, or care to read, the Preface to the ‘ Book of Common 
Prayer,’ will find there expressed and denounced. Here 
is the passage: ‘Moreover the number and hardness of 
the rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of 
the service, was the cause that to turn the book only was 
so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was 
more business to find out what should be read than to 
read it when it was found out.’ To leave your type in 
‘ pie ’ is to leave it unsorted and in confusion, and ‘ apple- 
pie order,’ which we take to be ‘ chapel-pie order,’ is to 
leave anything in a thorough mess. Those who like to 
take the other side, and assert that ‘apple-pie order’ 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


403 


means in perfect order, may still find their derivation in 
* chapel-pie ’; for the ordering and sorting of the * pie 1 or 
type is enforced in every ‘ chapel ’ or printing-house by 
severe fines, and so ‘ cliapel-pie order ’ would be such order 
of the type as the best friends of the chapel would wish 
to see.” “ The bitter end,” a phrase often heard during 
the late civil war, has a remarkable etymology. A ship’s 
cable has always two ends. One end is fastened to the 
anchor and the other to the “ bits,” or “ bitts,” a frame 
of two strong pieces of timber fixed perpendicularly in 
the fore part of the ship, for the express purpose of 
holding the cables. Hence the “ bitter,” or “ bitter 
end,” is the end fastened to the bitts; and when the cable 
is out to the “bitter end,” it is all out; the extremity 
has come. 

Few persons who utter the word “ stranger,” suspect that 
it has its root in the single vowel e, the Latin preposition for 
“ from,” which it no more resembles than a bird resembles 
an egg. The links in the chain are,— e, ex , extra, extraneus, 
etranger, stranger. When a boy answers a lady, “ Yes’m,” 
he does not dream that his “ m ” is a fragment of the five 
syllables, mea domina (“ madonna,” “ madame,” “ madam,” 
“ma’am” “’m ”). The French word meme is a striking 
illustration of what philologists call “ phonetic change,” 
which sometimes “ eats away the whole body of a word, and 
leaves nothing behind but decayed fragments.” Who would 
believe that mSme contains the Latin semetipsissimas? The 
words “ thrall ” and “ thraldom ” have an interesting his¬ 
tory. They come to us from a period when it was custom¬ 
ary to “ thrill ” (or drill) the ear of a slave in token of 
servitude; and hence the significance of Sir Thomas 
Browne’s remark, “ Bow not to the omnipotency of gold, nor 


404 


WORDS; THEIR USE AHD ABUSE. 


‘ bore ’ tliy ear to its servitude.” The expression “ ‘ signing 1 
one’s name ” takes us back to an age when most persons 
made their mark or “sign.” We must not suppose that 
this practice was then, as now, a proof of the ignorance of 
the signer. Among the Saxons, not only illiterate persons 
made this sign, but, as an attestation of the good faith of 
the person signing, the mark of the cross was required to be 
attached to the name of those who could write. From its 
holy association, it was the symbol of an oath; and hence 
the expression “ God save the mark!” which so long puz¬ 
zled the commentators of Shakespeare, is now understood 
to be a form of ejaculation resembling an oath. It is 
said that Charlemagne, being unable to write, was com¬ 
pelled to dip the forefinger of his glove in ink, and smear 
it over the parchment when it was necessary that the 
imperial sign-manual should be fixed to an edict. “Win¬ 
dow” is a corruption of “ wind-door,”—door to let in the 
wind. 

The word “handkerchief” is curiously fashioned. “Ker¬ 
chief,” the first form of the word, is from the French couvre- 
chef, “a head-covering.” If to “kerchief” we prefix 
“ hand,” we have a “ hand-head-covering,” or a covering for 
the head held in the hand, which is palpably absurd; but 
when we qualify this word by “ neck ” or “ pocket,” we 
reach the climax beyond which confusion can no farther go. 
How a covering for the “ head ” is to be held in the “ hand,” 
and yet carried in the “ pocket,” it requires a more than 
ordinarily vivid imagination to conceive. “ Constable ” is 
derived from comes stabuli , or “ Count of the stable,” who 
formerly had charge of the king’s horses. “ Bib ” is from 
bibere, to drink, the tucker being used to save the child’s 
clothes from whatever may be spilt when it is bibbing. 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


405 


“ Dollar ” is the German thaler, which is an abbreviation of 
Joachemsthaler, the valley where it was coined. 

“ Host,” an army, or a multitude,is from hostis ; “host,” 
an entertainer, is from hospes; “ host,” a sacrifice, is from 
hostia. The word “ rostrum ” is from the Latin rostra, the 
beak of a ship. After the submission of the Latins, 334 
B.C., the vessels of Antium having been burnt, their beaks 
were made to adorn the tribune in the Forum. From that 
time the rostra became the indispensable decoration of. the 
Forum, and hence the name “ rostrum ” to denote a plat¬ 
form for orators. “Verdict” is from veredictum , truly 
said. “ Palliate ” is from pallium , a cloak. “ Carat ” is 
from- the Arabic haura , a bean, the standard weight for 
diamonds. “ Salmon ” is from saliendo, which points to the 
“leaps” it makes. A “cur,” from the Latin curtus, is a 
curtailed dog, whose tail has been cut off for straying in 
the w r oods; a “terrier” is from terrarius , an earth dog; 
a “spaniel” is a Spanish dog; a “mongrel” is a dog 
of mingled breed; and the mastiff guards the maison, 
or house. A horse is called a “pony” when puny; a 
“hack” from “hackney;” and the lady’s horse was called 
a “ palfrey,” because it was led par le frein , or by the 
rein. 

A “ palace ” is so called from Collis Palatinus, one of the 
seven hills of Rome, which was itself called Palatinus, from 
Pales, a pastoral deity. On this hill stood the “ Golden 
House ” of Nero, which was called the Palatium, and 
became the type of the palaces of all the kings and emper¬ 
ors of Europe. The word “court” had its origin in the 
same locality and in the same distant age. It was on the 
hills of Latium that coliors or cors was first used in the 
sense of a “ hurdle,” an “ enclosure,” a “ cattle yard.” The 


40(5 


words; their use and ABUSE. 


cohortes , or divisions of the Roman army, were thus named, 
so many soldiers forming a pen or a court. Cors, cortis , 
became in mediaeval Latin curtis, and was used to denote a 
farm, or a castle built by a Roman settler in the provinces, 
and finally a royal residence, or palace. That a word orig¬ 
inally meaning “cow-pen,” or “cattle-yard,” should assume 
the meaning of “ palace,” and give rise to such derivatives 
as “ courteous,” “ courtesy,” and “ to court,” that is, to pay 
attentions, or to propose marriage, is a striking example of the 
strange transformations which words undergo in the course 
of ages. The “Court of the Star Chamber,” so odious in 
English history, derived its name from the ceiling of the 
room where it sat, which was dotted with stars. “ Pontiff” 
has an almost equally humble origin. It is from the Pons 
Sublicius, which Ancus Marcus placed on wooden joists, and 
which was rebuilt by the censor iEmilius Lepidus in the 
reign of the second of the Caesars,— the bridge which Hora- 
tius Codes defended, and whose construction, preservation, 
and maintenance were confided to the college of priests,— 
that the word “ pontiff” is derived. The word “ exchequer ” 
comes, according to Blackstone, from the “ checked ” cloth 
that covered the table behind which the money-changers 
sat. “ Suffrage ” is from suffragium, a broken piece or 
potsherd, used by the ancients in voting in their assem¬ 
blies. “Easter” is from the Anglo-Saxon, Eastre (German, 
Ostara), a heathen goddess whose feast was celebrated in 
the spring. Remains of the old pagan worship have sur¬ 
vived in Easter eggs, yule logs, and, on the Continent of 
Europe, Whitsun fires. 

“ Mystery,” something secret or unknown, comes from 
mu, the imitation of closing the lips; but “mystery,” 
in the Mystery Plays, such as continue to be per- 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


407 


formed at Ammergau, in Bavaria, is a corruption of 
ministerium ; it meant a religious ministry, or service, 
bad nothing to do with mystery, and should be spelled 
with an i, and not with a y. “ Puny ” is from the French 
puis-n'e, “ since horn,” hence, by metaphor, sickly, inferior, 
diminutive. From the same source is derived “puisne” 
(that is, younger, or inferior) judge. The phrase “ True 
Blue,” applied to the Presbyterians, is said by Dean Stan¬ 
ley to be owing to the distinct dress of the Scotch Presby¬ 
terian clergy, which at one time was a blue gown and a 
broad blue bonnet. The Episcopal clergy either were no 
distinctive dress in public services, or wore a black gown. 
The Rev. Dr. Murray, however, in an address before the 
Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, gave a differ- 
ent explanation of the phrase: “A. Scotchman once told 
me that when we were persecuted as a denomination, the 
minister was wont to go to the mountains, and when there 
was to be a communion a blue flag was held up as a signal 
or notice, and also as an invitation to attend, and some 
regard this as the origin of the term; but on a visit to 
Pompeii, a few years ago, I spent some time in inspecting 
the splendid frescoes of variegated hues. I found all 
colors had faded except the blue, and that was as bright 
as when first put on, though nearly two thousand years 
previously. The ‘true blue’ never gives out,— never 
changes. So, when we say of a man ‘ he is true blue,’ it 
is equivalent to saying he is firm in and true to his prin¬ 
ciples.” “France” owes its name to the Franks, who 
conquered her native Celts. The word Franc comes, ac¬ 
cording to a German philologist, either from the Teutonic 
franlid, “ bold,” “ frank,” or from franca , a sharp, double- 
edged battle-axe, which the Franks hurled with great dex- 


408 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


terity in attacking their enemies. From Franc are derived 
our words “ franchise ” and “ enfranchisement.” 

One of the most interesting classes of common words 
with curious derivations is that of the names of things or 
acts which were once names of persons. Language teems 
in this w*ay with honors to the great and good men who 
have been benefactors of their race; and it also avenges 
the wrongs of humanity by impaling the very names of 
the wrong-doers in a perpetual crucifixion. Many words of 
this class betray their origin at once. It is easy to recog¬ 
nize Tantalus in “ to tantalize,” Epicurus in “ epicure,” 
Mesmer in “ mesmerism,” Gordius in the “ gordian ” knot 
which Alexander cut, Galvani in “ galvanism,” Yolta in 
the “ voltaic ” pile, Daguerre in “ daguerreotype,” and Mc- 
Adam and Burke in “ to macadamize ” and “ to burke.” 
But when we read or hear of a work on “ algebra,” or of 
a person who has uttered “ gibberish,” we get no hint, at 
first, of Giber or Geber, the famous Arabian sage, who 
sought for the philosopher’s stone, and used, perhaps, 
senseless incantations. “ Artesian,” applied to a well, 
does not inform us that such a well was first cut through 
the chalk basin of the province of Artois. We speak of a 
“ dun ” without suspecting that the word came from the 
name of a stern bailiff in the time of Henry VII, one 
Dun, who was eminently successful in collecting debts. 
We hear of a “maudlin” speech without thinking of 
Mary Magdalen; of a “lazaretto,” without being re¬ 
minded of Lazarus; of “simony” without a suggestion 
of Simon Magus; and of “silhouettes,” without a suspi¬ 
cion that it was the unpopular French minister of finance, 
M. de Silhouette, whose persistent economy doomed his 
name to be affixed to the slight and cheap outline por- 


CURIOSITIES OE LANGUAGE. 


409 


traits thus named. “ Martinet ” does not recall the rigid 
disciplinarian in the army of Louis XIV, nor does a 
“ tram-road ” point very plainly to Outram, the inventor. 
In “ saunterer ” we do not readily detect La Sainte Terre, 
“the Holy Land,” the pilgrims to which took their own 
time to get there; nor would a “pander” ever remind us 
of the Trojan general Pandarus, or “tawdry” of the fair 
of St. Etheldreda, or St. Awdry, where gaudy finery was 
sold. “Music,” “museum,” and “mosaic,” do not inevi¬ 
tably suggest the Muses, nor does a “ pasquinade ” tell us 
about the statue of an ancient gladiator which was ex¬ 
humed at Rome, in the peculiar physiognomy of which 
the wits of that city detected a resemblance to Pasquino, 
a snappish cobbler, who lived near by, and on the pedestal 
of which it became a practice to post lampoons. Few men 
think of Jaque, of Beauvais, as they put on “jackets”; 
of Blacket, who first manufactured the article, when they 
lie under “blankets”; or of Hermes Trismegistus, the 
Egyptian priest, when they “ hermetically ” seal a bottle or 
fruit can. Excepting the readers of Pascal, it is probable 
that not many Frenchmen detect in the word escobarder, 
“ to equivocate,” the name of the great casuist of the Jesuits, 
Escobar, whose subtle devices for the evasion of the moral 
law have been immortalized in the “ Provincial Letters.” 

Vulcan is still at his forge in “ volcanoes,” and has even 
descended so low as to “vulcanize” rubber; and though 
“Great Pan is dead,” he comes to life again in every 
“panic.” A “sandwich” calls to mind Lord Sandwich, 
the inveterate gamester, who begrudged the time necessary 
for a meal; and the “spencer” recalls Lord Spencer, who 
in hunting lost one skirt of his coat, and tore off the 
other,— which led some inventive genius to make half- 


410 


words; their use and abuse. 


coats, and call them “spencers.” Of the two noble lords 
it has been said that 

“The one invented half a coat, 

The other half a dinner.” 

Epic and dramatic poetry, and fiction generally, have 
added much to the force and suggestiveness of speech. 
What apt and expressive terms are “utopian”* (from the 
name given by Sir Thomas More to his imaginary island), 
and “quixotic”! With what other words could we supply 
the place of Dean Swift’s “liliputian” and “ brobdirig- 
nagian,” Kenny’s “Jeremy Diddler,” or Dickens’s “pick- 
wickian ” and “ Circumlocution Office ”? What convenient 
terms are “thrasonical,” from Thraso, the braggart of the 
Roman comedy, and “ rodomontade,” from Rodamonte, a 
hero of Boiardo, who, strange to say, does not brag and 
bluster, as the word based on his name seems to imply! 
It is said that Boiardo, when he had hit upon the name 
of his hero, had the village bells rung for joy. To Homer 
we are indebted for “stentorian,” that is, loud-voiced, from 
Stentor, the Greek herald, whose voice surpassed the united 
shout of fifty men; and for the word “to hector,” founded 
on the big talk of the Trojan hero. 

The language of savages teems with expressions of deep 
interest both to the philologist and the student of human 
nature. Speech with them is a perpetual creation of utter¬ 
ances to image forth the total picture in their minds. 
The Indian “does not analyze his thoughts or separate his 
utterances; his thoughts rush forth in a troop. His speech 
is as a kindling cloud, not as radiant points of light.” 
The Lenni Lenape Indians express by one polysyllable 
what with us requires seven monosyllables and three dis- 


*From ov and to7tos, “no-place.” 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


411 


syllables, viz.: “Come with the canoe and take us across 
the river.” This polysyllable is nadholineen , and it is 
formed by taking parts of several words and cementing 
them into one. In the Iroquois language one word of 
twenty-one letters expresses this sentence of eighteen 
words: “I give some money to those who have arrived, 
in order to buy them more clothes with it.” The apparent 
wealth of synonyms and of grammatical forms in savage 
languages is due, not to the mental superiority of the races 
that speak them, but to their inferiority,— their deficiency 
in the power of abstraction. “ The more barbarous a 
language,” says Herder, “the greater is the number of its 
conjugations.” We must not suppose that simplicity in 
language precedes complexity: simplicity is the triumph 
of science, not the spontaneous result of intelligence. The 
natives of the Society Isles have one word for the tail of a 
dog, another for the tail of a bird, and a third for the tail 
of a sheep, while for “tail” itself, “tail” in the abstract, 
they have no word whatever. The Mohicans have words 
for wood-cutting, cutting the head, etc., yet no verb mean¬ 
ing simply to cut. Even the Anglo-Saxon language, which 
had a sufficiency of words for all shades of green, red, 
blue, yellow, had to borrow from the Latin the abstract 
word “color,” and, while possessing abundant names for 
every sort of crime, derived from the same source the 
abstract words “crime” and “transgression.” 

Some Indian tribes call a squirrel by a name signifying 
that he “can stick fast in a tree”; a mole, by a word 
signifying “carrying the right hand on the left shoulder”; 
and they have a name for a horse which means “having 
only one toe.” Among the savages of the Pacific, “ to 
think” is “to speak in the stomach.” 


412 


words; their use and abuse. 


WORDS OF ILLUSIVE ETYMOLOGY. 

In the lapse of ages words undergo great changes of 
form, so that it becomes at last difficult or impossible to 
ascertain their origin. Terms, of which the composition 
was originally clear, are worn and rubbed by use like the 
pebbles which are fretted and rounded into shape and 
smoothness by the sea waves or by a rapid stream. Like 
the image and superscription of a coin, their meaning is 
often so worn away that one cannot make even a probable 
guess at their origin. One of the commonest causes of the 
corruptions of words, by which their sources and original 
meanings are disguised, is the instinctive dislike we feel 
to the use of a word that is wholly new to us, and the 
consequent tendency to fasten upon it a meaning which 
shall remove its seemingly arbitrary character. Foreign 
words, therefore, when adopted into a language, are espe¬ 
cially liable to these changes, being corrupted both in 
pronunciation and orthography. By thus anglicizing them, 
we not only avoid the uncouth, barbarous sounds which 
are so offensive to the ear, but we help the memory by 
associating the words with others already known. 

The mistakes which have been made in attempting to 
trace the origin of words thus disguised, have done not 
a little, at times, to bring philology into contempt. The 
philologist, unless he has much native good sense, and 
rules his inclinations with an iron rod, is apt to become 
a verbomaniac. There is a strange fascination in word¬ 
hunting, and his hobby-horse, it has been aptly said, is 
a strong goer that trifles never balk. “ To him the British 
Channel is a surface drain, the Alps and Apennines mere 
posts and rails, the Mediterranean a simple brook, and 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


413 


the Himalayas only an outlying cover.” Cowper justly 
ridicules those word-hunters who, in their eagerness to 
make some startling discovery, never pause to consider 
whether there is any historic connection between two 
languages, one of which is supposed to have borrowed a 
word from another,— 

“ Learned philologists, who chase 
A panting syllable through time and space, 

Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 

To Gaul,— to Greece,— and into Noah’s ark.” 

A fundamental rule, to be kept constantly in sight by 
those who would not et} r mologize at random, is, that no 
amount of resemblance between words in different lan¬ 
guages is sufficient to prove their relationship, nor is any 
amount of seeming unlikeness in sound or form sufficient 
to disprove their consanguinity. Many etymologies are 
true which appear improbable, and many appear probable 
which are not true. As Max Muller says: “Sound ety¬ 
mology has nothing to do with sound. We know words 
to be of the same origin which have not a single letter 
in common, and which differ in meaning as much as black 
and white.” On the other hand, two words which have 
identically the same letters may have no etymological 
connection. An instance of the last case is the French 
souris , a smile, and souris , a mouse, from the Latin sub- 
ridere and sorex respectively. Fuller amusingly says that 
“ we are not to infer the Hebrew and the English to be 
cognate languages because one of the giants, son of Anak, 
was called A-hi-man yet some of his own etymologies, 
though witty and ingenious, are hardly more correct than 
this punning derivation. Thus “ compliments,” he says, is 
derived from d complete mentiri , because compliments are 
in general completely mendacious; and he quotes approv- 


414 


words; their use and abuse. 


ingly Sir John Harrington’s derivation of the old English 
“elf” and “goblin,” from the names of two political 
factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. 

Archbishop Trench speaks of an eminent philologist 
who deduced “girl” from garrulct, girls being commonly 
talkative. “Frontispiece” is usually regarded as a piece 
or picture in front of a book; whereas it means literally 
“ a front view,” being from the Low Latin, frontispicium, 
the forefront of a house. The true origin of many words 
is hidden by errors in the spelling. “ Bran-new” is brand- 
new, i.e ., “burnt new.” “Grocer” should be “grosser,” 
one who sells in the gross; “pigmy” is properly “pyg¬ 
my,” as Worcester spells it, and means a thing the size 
of one’s fist (nuy/nj). “ Policy,” state-craft, is rightly 
spelled; but “policies of insurance” ought to have the 
ll , the word being derived from polliceor, to promise 
or assure. “ Island ” looks as if it were compounded of 
“ isle ” and “ land ”; but it is the same word as the Anglo- 
Saxon ealand, water-land, compounded of ea , water, and 
“ land.” So Jersey is literally “ Caesar’s island.” “ Lieu¬ 
tenant” has been pronounced “leftenant,” from a notion 
that this officer holds the “ left ” of the line w r hile the 
captain holds the right. The word comes from the French, 
lieu-tenant , one holding the place of another. 

“Wiseacre” has no connection with “acre.” The word 
is a corruption, both in spelling and pronunciation, of the 
German weissager , a “ wise-sayer,” or sa} 7 er of wise maxims. 
“Gooseberry,” Dr. Johnson explains as “a fruit eaten as 
a sauce for goose.” It is, however, a corruption of the 
German, krausbeere ,— from kraus or gorse , crisp; and the 
fruit gets its name from the upright hairs with which it 
is covered. “ Shame-faced ” does not mean having a face 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


415 


denoting shame. It is from the Anglo-Saxon, sceamfaest, 
protected by shame. “ Surname ” is from the French, 
surnom , meaning additional name, and should not, there¬ 
fore, be spelled “ surname,” as if it meant the name of 
one’s sire. “ Freemason ” is not half Saxon, but is from 
the French, frere?nagon, brother mason. “ Foolscap ” is a 
corruption of the Italian, foglio capo , a full-sized sheet 
of paper. “Country-dance” is a corruption of the French 
contre-danse , in which the partners stand in opposite lines. 

“ Bishop,” which looks like an Anglo-Saxon word, is 
from the Greek. It means primarily an overseer, in Latin 
episcopns, which the Saxons broke down into “ biscop,” 
and then softened into “ bishop.” There was formerly an 
adjective “bishoply”; but as, after the Norman Conquest, 
the bishops, and those who discussed their rights and 
duties, used French and Latin rather than English, “epis¬ 
copal ” has taken its place. Among the foreign words 
most frequently corrupted are the names of plants, which 
gardeners, not understanding, change into words that 
sound like the true ones, and with which they are familiar. 
In their new costume they often lose all their original 
significance and beauty. To this source of corruption we 
owe such words as “dandelion,” from the French, dent de 
lion , lion’s tooth; “rosemary,” from ros marinus; “quar¬ 
ter-sessions rose,” the meaningless name of the beautiful 
rose des quatre saisons; “ Jerusalem artichoke,” into which, 
with a ludicrous disregard for geography, we have meta¬ 
morphosed the sunflower artichoke, articiocco girasole, 
which came to us from Pery, through Italy; and “sparrow- 
grass,” which we have substituted for “ asparagus.” 

Animals have fared no better than plants; the same 
dislike of outlandish words, which are meaningless to 


416 


words; their use and abuse. 


them, leads sailors to corrupt Bellerophon into “ Billy 
Ruffian,” and hostlers to convert Othello and Desdemona 
into “Odd Fellow and Thursday morning,” and Lam- 
procles into “Lamb and Pickles.” The souris dormeuse, 
or sleeping mouse, has been transformed into a “dor¬ 
mouse”; the hog-fish, or porcpisce , as Spenser terms him, 
is disguised as a “porpoise”; and the French dcrevisse 
turns up a “ crayfish ” or “ crawfish.” The transformations 
of the latter word, which has passed through three lan¬ 
guages before attaining its present form, are among the 
most surprising feats of verbal legerdemain. Starting on 
its career as the old High German krebiz , it next appears 
in English as “crab,” and in German as krebs , or “crab,” 
from the grabbing or clutching action of the animal. 
Next it crosses the Rhine, and becomes the French ecrevisse ; 
then crosses the Channel, and takes the form of krevys ; 
and, last of all, with a double effort at anglicizing, it 
appears in modern English as “crawfish” or “crayfish.” 
The last two words noticed illustrate the tendency which 
is so strong, in the corruption of words, to invent new 
forms which shall be appropriate as well as significant, 
other examples of which we have in “wormwood” from 
wermuth , “ lanthorn ” from laterna, “ beefeater ” from 
buffetier, “ rakehell ” from racaille , “ catchrogue ” from the 
Norman-French cachreau , a bum-bailiff, and “ shoot ” for 
chute , a fall or rapid. So the French, beffroi , a strong¬ 
hold or tower,—a movable tower of several stories used in 
besieging,—has been corrupted into “ belfry,” though there 
is no such French word as “ bell.” 

Often the corrupted form gives birth to a wholly false 
explanation. Thus in the proverbial dormir comme une 
taupe, which has been twisted into the phrase “to sleep 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


417 


like a top,” there is no trace of the mole; and the cor¬ 
ruption of acheter, to buy, into “achat,”—which in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in London the word 
for trading, and was first pronounced and then written 
“ acat,”—led to the story that Whittington, the famous Lord 
Mayor, obtained his wealth by selling and re-selling “ a 
cat.” There is no hint in “somerset” of its derivation 
from the Italian, soprasalto, an overleap, through the 
French, sobresault, and the early English, to “somersault”; 
nor would the shrewdest guesser ever discover in faire un 
faux pas , to commit a blunder, the provincial saying, “ to 
make a fox’s paw.” The word “ceiling,” from the old 
French seel, “a seal,” was formerly written “seeling,’] and 
meant a wainscoating, a covering with boards for the pur¬ 
pose of sealing up chinks and cracks. The spelling was 
changed from an opinion that the word is derived from 
del, which means “heaven” and “a canopy.” 

Among the most frequent corruptions are the names of 
places and persons. Thus Penne, Coombe, and Ick, the 
former name of Falmouth, has been transformed into 
“ Penny-come-quick ”; and the corruption of Chateau Vert 
into “Shotover” has led to the legend that Little John 
“shot over” the hill of that name near Oxford, England. 
Leighton-beau-desert has been converted into “Leighton- 
Buzzard”; Bridge-Walter, in Somersetshire, into “Bridge- 
water.” The Chartreuse has become the “Charter-House.” 
Sheremoniers Lane, so called because the artisans dwelt 
there whose business it was to sheer or cut bullion into 
shape for the die, became first “ Sheremongers Lane,” and 
then, from its nearness to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and an 
analogy with Amen Corner and Paternoster Row, passed 
into “Sermon Lane.” The origin of the well known legend 


418 


words; their use and abuse. 


of Bishop Hatto, who forestalled the corn from the poor, 
and was devoured in his fortress on the Rhine by rats, is 
owing, it is said, to a corruption of the name of the maut- 
thurm , or custom-house, into the mduse-thurm , or “ Mouse- 
tower.” The Cologne myth of the eleven thousand virgins 
is supposed by an English philologist to have sprung from 
the name of St. Undecemilla, a virgin martyr. “ The in¬ 
sertion of a single letter in the calendar has changed this 
name into the form ‘ Undecem rnillia Virg. Mart' The 
bones of the eleven thousand, which are reverently shown 
to the pious pilgrim, have been pronounced by Professor 
Owen to comprise the remains of almost all the quadrupeds 
indigenous to the district.” The name “ Gypsies ” is a 
misnomer springing out of an error in ethnology. When 
they first appeared in Europe, nearly five centuries ago, 
their dark complexion and their unknown language led 
men to suppose that they were Egyptians, which word was 
corrupted into “Gypsies.” Boulogne Mouth was corrupted 
by the British sailors into “Bull and Mouth”; and Surajah 
Dowlah, the name of the Bengal prince who figured in 
the famous Black Hole atrocity, the British soldiers per¬ 
sisted in anglicizing into “ Sir Roger Dowlas ”! “ Bed¬ 

lam ” is a corruption of Bethlehem, and gets its mean¬ 
ing from a London priory, St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, which 
was converted into a lunatic asylum. 

“ To curry favor ” is said to be a corrupt translation of 
the French proverbial phrase etriller Fauveau, “ to curry 
the chestnut horse.” It was usual to make a proper name 
of the color of a horse, as Bayard, Dun, Ball, Favel, etc. 
Hence the proverbs, “ To have Ball in the stable,” “ Dun 
in the mire,” “To curry Favel,” in which last some un¬ 
known Bentley substituted “favor” for Favel when the 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


419 


meaning of the latter had ceased to be understood. An¬ 
other striking illustration of the freaks of popular usage 
by which the etymology of words is obscured, is the word 
“ causeway.’’ Mr. W. W. Skeat, in a late number of 
“ Notes and Queries,” states that the old spelling of the 
word was “ calcies.” The Latin was calceata via , a road 
made with lime; hence the Spanish, calzada, a paved way, 
and the modern French, chaussee. “The English Word,” 
Mr. Skeats says, “ used to be more often spelled ‘ causey,’ 
as, for instance, by Cotgrave; and popular etymology, 
always on the alert to infuse some sort of meaning into 
a strange word, turned ‘ causey ’ into ‘ causeway,’ with the 
trifling drawback that, while we all know what ‘ way ’ 
means, no one can extract any sense out of ‘ cause.’ ” 

Words from the dead languages have naturally under¬ 
gone the most signal corruptions, many of them completely 
disguising the derivation. Sometimes the word is con¬ 
densed, as in “ alms,” from the Greek lAey/MxruvT), in early 
English, “almesse,” now cut down to four letters; “sum¬ 
mons,” a legal term, abbreviated (like the fi. fa. of the 
lawyers) from submoneas ; “palsy,” an abridgment of 
“paralysis,” literally a relaxation; “quinsy,” in French 
esquinancie, which, strange to say, is the same word as 
“ synagogue,” coming, like this last, from together, 
and a/(o, to draw. “Megrim” is a corruption of “liemi- 
crany,” a pain affecting half of the head. “Treacle, ’ now 
applied only to molasses or sirup, was originally viper’s 
flesh made into a medicine for the viper’s bite. It is called 
in French theriaque, from a corresponding Greek word; 
in early English, “ triacle.” “ Zero ” is a contraction of the 
Italian zephiro, a zephyr, a breath of air, a nothing. Another 
name for it is “ cipher,” from the Arabic, cifr , empty. 


420 


words; their use and abuse. 


CONTRADICTORY MEANINGS. 

Among the curious phenomena of language one of the 
most singular is the use of the same word in two distinct 
senses, directly opposed to each other. Ideas are associated 
in the mind not only by resemblance but by contrast; and 
thus the same root, slightly modified, may express the most 
opposite meanings. A striking example of this, is the 
word “ fast,” which is full of contradictory meanings. A 
clock is called “ fast,” when it goes too quickly; but a man 
is told to stand “ fast,” when he is desired to stand still. 
Men “fast” when they have nothing to eat; and they eat 
“fast” after a long abstinence. “Fast” men, as we have 
already seen, are apt to be very “ loose ” in their habits. 
When “fast” is used in the sense of “abstinence,” the 
idea may be, as in the Latin, abstineo , holding back from 
food; or the word may come from the Gothic, fastan, “to 
keep” or “observe,”—that is, the ordinance of the church. 
The verb “to overlook” is used in two contradictory 
senses; as, he overlooked the men at work, he overlooked 
the error. 

The word “ nervous ” may mean either possessing or 
wanting nerve. A “nervous” writer is one who has 
force and energy; a “nervous” man is one who is weak, 
sensitive to trifles, easily excited. The word “ post,” from 
the Latin positum, placed, is used in the most various 
senses. We speak of a “ post”-office, of “ post’’-haste, of 
“ post’’-horses, and of “post”-ing a ledger. The contra¬ 
diction in these meanings is more apparent than real. The 
idea of “ placing ” is common to them all. Before the in¬ 
vention of railways, letters were transmitted from place to 
place (or post to post) by relays of horses stationed at in- 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


421 


tervals so that no delay might occur. The “ post ’’-office used 
this means of communication, and the horses were said to 
travel “ post ’’-haste. To “ post ” a ledger is to place or 
register its several items. 

The word “to let” generally means to permit; but in 
the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in legal phraseology, it often 
has the very opposite meaning. Thus Hamlet says, “I’ll 
make a ghost of him that lets me,” that is, interferes with 
or obstructs me; and in law books “without let or hin¬ 
drance ” is a phrase of frequent occurrence. It should be 
remarked, however, that “ to let,” in the first sense, is from 
the Saxon, laetan; in the second, from letjan. The word 
“ to cleave ” may mean either to adhere to closely, as when 
Cowper says, “ Sophistry cleaves close and protects sin’s 
rotten trunk ”; or it may mean to split or to rend asunder, 
as in the sentence, “ He cleaved the stick at one blow.” 
According to Matzner, the word in the first sense is from 
the Anglo-Saxon, cleofan, clufan ; in the last sense, it is 
from cli/an, clifian. The word “dear” has the two mean¬ 
ings of “ prized ” because you have it, and “ expensive ” 
because you want it. The word “ lee ” has very different 
acceptations in “lee’’-side and “lee’’-shore. 

The word “ mistaken ” has quite opposite meanings. 
“ You are mistaken ” may mean “ You mistake,” or “ You 
are misunderstood,” or “ taken for somebody else.” In the 
line 

“ Mistaken souls that dream of heaven,” 

in a popular hymn, the word is used, of course, in the 
former sense. The adjective “mortal” means both “dead¬ 
ly” and “liable to death.” Of the large number of adjec¬ 
tives ending in “ able ” or “ ible,” some have a subjective 
and others an objective sense. A “ terrible ” sight is one 


422 


words; their use and abuse. 


that is able to inspire terror; but a “readable” book is 
one which you can read. It is said that the word “wit” 
is used in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” with at least seven 
different meanings. 


The prefixes “ un ” and “ in ” are equivocal. Commonly 
they have a negative force, as in “ unnecessary,” “ incom¬ 
plete.” But sometimes, both in verbs and adjectives, they 
have a positive or intensive meaning, as in the words 
“ intense,” “ infatuated,” “ invaluable.” To “ invigorate ” 
one’s physical system by exercise, is not to lessen, but to 
increase one’s energy. The verb “unloose” should, by 
analogy, signify “ to tie,” just as “ untie ” means “ to loose.” 
“Inhabitable” should signify “not habitable,” according 
to the most frequent use of “ in.” To “ unravel ” means 
the same as “to ravel”; to “unrip” the same as “to rip.” 
Johnson sanctions the use of the negative prefix in these 
two words, but Richardson and Webster condemn it as 
superfluous. Walton, in his “Angler,” tells an amusing 
anecdote touching the two words. “We heard,” he says, 
“ a high contention amongst the beggars, whether it was 
easiest to ‘rip’ a cloak or ‘unrip’ a cloak. One beggar 
affirmed it was all one; but that was denied, by asking 
her, if doing and undoing were all one. Then another 
said, ’twas easiest to unrip a cloak, for that was to let it 
alone; but she was answered by asking how she could 
unrip it, if she let it alone.” 

This opposition in the meanings of a word is a phenom¬ 
enon not altogether peculiar to the English language. In 
Greek, Ood^eiv has the seemingly contradictory meanings 
of “to move hastily,” and “ to sit”; xpeia means both “ use” 
and “need”; and Ariw means both “to wish” and “to 
take.” In Latin, sacer means “set apart” or “tabooed,” 


CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE. 


423 


and unicus implies singularity,— unitas , association. Many 
other examples might be cited to show that “ as rays of 
light may be reflected and refracted in all possible ways 
from the primary direction, so the meaning of a word 
may be deflected from its original bearing in a variety of 
manners; and consequently we cannot well reach the 
primitive force of the term unless we know the precise 
gradations through which it has gone.” 

Several writers on our language have noticed a singu¬ 
lar tendency to limit or narrow the signification of certain 
words, whose etymology would suggest a far wider appli¬ 
cation. Why should we not “ retaliate ” (that is, pay 
back in kind, res , talis) kindnesses as well as injuries? 
Why should we “resent” (feel again) insults, and not 
affectionate words and deeds? Why should our hate, ani¬ 
mosity, hostility, and other bad passions, be “ inveterate ” 
(that is, gain strength by age), but our better feelings, 
love, kindness, charity, never? Byron showed a true 
appreciation of the better uses to which the word might 
be put, when he subscribed a letter to a friend, “ Yours 
inveterately, Byron.” 

In some of our nouns there is a nice distinction of 
meaning between the singular and the plural. A “ min¬ 
ute” is a fraction of time; “minutes” are notes of a 
speech, conversation, etc. The “ manner ” in which a man 
enters a drawing-room may be unexceptionable, while his 
“ manners ” are very bad. When the “ Confederates ” 
threatened to pull down the American “ colors ” at New 
Orleans, they did it under “ color ” of right. A person 
was once asked whether a certain lawyer had got rich 
by his practice. “ No,” was the sarcastic reply, “ but by 
his practices.” 


CHAPTER XVI. 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold, 
Alike fantastic if too new or old; 

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, 

Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.—P ope. 


If a gentleman be to study any language, it ought to be that of his own 
country.— Locke. 

Aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as well 
as in politics.— W. D. Whitney. 

People who write essays to prove that though a word in fact means one 
thing, it ought to mean another, or that though all well educated Englishmen 
do conspire to use this expression, they ought to use that, are simply bores. 
—Edinburgh Review. 


NE of the most gratifying signs of the times is the 



deep interest which both our scholars and our people 
are beginning to manifest in the study of our noble English 
tongue. Perhsps nothing has contributed more to awaken 
a public interest in this matter, and to call attention to 
some of the commonest improprieties of speech, than the 
publication of “The Queen’s English” and “The Dean’s 
English,” and the various criticisms which have been pro¬ 
voked in England and in the United States by the Moon- 
Alford controversy. Hundreds of persons who before felt 
a profound indifference to this subject, have had occasion 
to thank the Dean for awakening their curiosity in regard 
to it; and hundreds more who otherwise would never have 
read his dogmatic small-talk, or Mr. Moon’s trenchant 
dissection of it, have suddenly found themselves, in con¬ 
sequence of the newspaper criticisms of the two books, 



COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OE SPEECH. 


425 


keenly interested in questions of grammar, and now, with 
their appetites whetted, will continue the study of their 
own language, till they have mastered its difficulties, and 
familiarized themselves with all its idioms and idiotisms. 
Of such discussions we can hardly have too many, and just 
now they are imperiously needed to check the deluge of 
barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties, with which our 
language is threatened. Not only does political freedom 
make every man in America an inventor, alike of labor- 
saving machines and of labor-saving words, but the mixture 
of nationalities is constantly coining and exchanging new 
forms of speech, of which our busy Bartletts, in their lists 
of Americanisms, find it impossible to keep account. 

It is not merely our spoken language that is dis¬ 
figured by these blemishes; but our written language,— 
the prose of the leading English authors,— exhibits more 
slovenliness and looseness of diction than is found in any 
other literature. That this is due in part to the very 
character of the language itself, there can be no doubt. 
Its simplicity of structure and its copiousness both tend 
to prevent its being used with accuracy and care; and it 
is so hospitable to alien words that it needs more powerful 
securities against revolution than other languages of less 
heterogeneous composition. But the chief cause must be 
found in the character of the English-speaking race. 
There is in our very blood a certain lawlessness, which 
makes us intolerant of syntactical rules, and restive under 
pedagogical restraints. “Our sturdy English ancestors,” 
says Blackstone, “ held it beneath the condition of a free¬ 
man to appear, or to do any other act, at the precise 
time appointed.” The same proud, independent Spirit 
which made the Saxons of old rebel against the servitude 


426 


words; their use and abuse. 


of punctuality, prompts their descendants to spurn the 
yoke of grammar and purism. In America this scorn of 
obedience, whether to political authority or philological, 
is fostered and intensified by the very genius of our insti¬ 
tutions. We seem to doubt whether we are entirely free, 
unless we apply the Declaration of Independence to our 
language, and carry the Monroe doctrine even into our 
grammar. 

The degree to which this lawlessness has been carried 
will be seen more strikingly if we compare our English 
literature with the literature of France. It has been 
justly said that the language of that country is a science 
in itself, and the labor bestowed on the acquisition of it 
has the effect of vividly impressing on the mind both the 
faults and the beauties of every writer’s style. Method 
and perspicuity are its very essence; and there is hardly 
a writer of note who does not attend to these requisites 
with scrupulous care. Let a French writer of distinction 
violate any cardinal rule of grammar, and he is pounced 
upon instantly by the critics, and laughed at from Calais 
to Marseilles. When Boileau, who is a marvel of verbal 
and grammatical correctness, made a slip in the first line 
of his Ninth Satire, 

“C’est a vous, mon Esprit, a qui je veux parler,” 

the grammatical sensibility of the French ear was shocked 
to a degree that we, who tolerate the grossest solecisms, 
find it hard to estimate. For two centuries the blunder 
has been quoted by every writer on grammar, and im¬ 
pressed on the memory of every schoolboy. Indeed, such 
is the national fastidiousness on this subject, that it has 
been doubted whether a single line in Boileau has been 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


427 


so often quoted for its beauty, as this unfortunate one 
for its lack of grammar. When did an English or an 
American writer thus offend the critical ears of his coun¬ 
trymen, even though he were an Alison, sinning against 
Lindley Murray on every page? 

We are no friends to hypercriticism, or to that finical 
niceness wTiich cares more for the body than for the soul 
of language, more for the outward expression than for 
the thought which it incarnates. Too much rigor is as 
unendurable as laxity. It is, no doubt, possible to be so 
over-nice in the use of words and the construction of sen¬ 
tences as to sap the vitality of our speech. We may so 
refine our expression, by continual straining in our crit¬ 
ical sieves, as to impair both the strength and the flexi¬ 
bility of our noble English tongue. There are some 
verbal critics, who, apparently go so far as to hold that 
every word must have an invariable meaning, and that 
all relations of thoughts must be indicated by absolute 
and invariable formulas, thus reducing verbal expression 
to the rigid inflexibility of a mathematical equation. If 
we understand Mr. Moon’s censures of Murray and Alford, 
some of them are based on the assumption that an ellipsis 
is rarely, if ever, permissible in English speech. We have 
no sympathy with such extremists, nor wuth the verbal 
purists who challenge all words and phrases that cannot be 
found in the “ wells of English undefiled,” that have been 
open for more than a hundred years. We must take the 
good with the bad in the incessant changes and masquer¬ 
ades of language. “ The severe judgment of the scholar 
may condemn as verbiage that undergrowth of words 
which threatens to choke up and impoverish the great 
roots that have occupied the soil from the earliest times; 


428 words; their use and abuse. 

he may apprehend wreck and disaster to the fixedness of 
language when he sees words loosened from their etymons, 
and left to drift upon the ocean at the mercy of wind and 
tide; and he is justified in every seasonable and reasonable 
attempt he makes to reconcile current and established sig¬ 
nifications with the sanction of authority . 11 But it must 
not be forgotten that language is a living, organic thing, 
and by the very law of its life must always be in a fluc¬ 
tuating state. To petrify it into immutable forms, to pre¬ 
serve it as one preserves fruits and flowers in spirits of 
wine and herbariums, is as hopeless as it would be unde¬ 
sirable, if we would have it a medium for the ever-chang¬ 
ing thoughts of man. 

Language is a growing thing, as truly as a tree; and as 
a tree, while it casts off some leaves, will continually put 
forth others, so a language will be perpetually growing 
and expanding with the discoveries of science, the exten¬ 
sion of commerce, and the progress of thought. Such 
events as the growth of the Roman Empire, the introduc¬ 
tion of Christianity, the rise of the scholastic and of the 
mystic theology in the middle ages, the irruption of the 
northern barbarians into Italy, the establishment of the 
Papacy, the introduction of the feudal system, the Cru¬ 
sades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Ameri¬ 
can Civil War, give birth to new ideas, which clamor for 
new words to express them. Every age thus enriches 
language with new accessions of beauty and strength. 
Not only are new words coined, but old ones continually 
take on new senses; and it is only in the transition period, 
before they have established themselves in the general 
favor of good speakers and writers, that purity of style 
requires them to be shunned. Those who are so ignorant 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


429 


of the laws of language as to resist its expansion,— who 
declare that it has attained at any time the limit of its 
development, and seek by philological bulls to check its 
growth,— will find that, like a vigorous forest tree, it will 
defy any shackles that men may bind about it; .that it will 
reck as little of their decrees as did the advancing ocean 
of those of Canute. The critics who make such attempts 
do not see that the immobility of language would be the 
immobility of history. They forget that many of the 
purest words in our language were at one time startling 
novelties, and that even the dainty terms in which they 
challenge each new-comer, though now naturalized, had 
once to fight their way inch by inch. Shakespeare ridi¬ 
cules “ element Fulke, in the seventeenth century, ob¬ 
jects to such ink-horn terms as “ rational,” “ scandal,” 
“homicide,” “ponderous,” and “prodigious”; Dryden cen¬ 
sures “ embarrass,” “ grimace,” “ repartee,” “ foible,” 
“tour,” and “rally”; Swift denounces “hoax” as low 
and vulgar; Pope condemns “witless,” “welkin,” and 
“dulcet”; and Franklin, who could draw from the clouds 
the electric fluid which now carries language with the 
speed of lightning from land to land, vainly struggled 
against the introduction of the words “to advocate” and 
“to notice.” In the “New World of Words,” by Edward 
Phillips, published in 1678, there is a long list of words 
which he declared should be either used warily or rejected 
as barbarous. Among these words are the following, 
which are all in good use to-day: autograph, aurist, bib- 
liograph, circumstantiate, evangelize, ferocious, holograph, 
inimical, misanthropist, misogynist, and syllogize. 

The word “ Fatherland ” seems so natural that we are 
apt to regard it as an old word; yet the elder Disraeli 


430 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


claims tlie honor of having introduced it. Macaulay tells 
us that the word “gutted,” which was doubtless objected 
to as vulgar, was first used on the night in which James II 
fled from London: “The king’s printing-house . . . was, 
to use a coarse metaphor, which then, for the first time, 
came into fashion, completely gutted.'" How much circum¬ 
locution is saved by the word “antecedents” (formerly a 
grammatical term only), in its new sense, denoting a man’s 
past history; with reference to which Punch says it would 
be more satisfactory to know something of a suspected 
man’s relatives than of his antecedents! What a happy, 
ingenious use of an old word is that of “ telescope ” to 
describe a railway accident, when the force of a collision 
causes the cars to run or fit into each other, like the 
shortening slides of a telescope! The term is so picturesque 
and so convenient in avoiding a periphrasis, that it cannot 
fail to be stamped with the seal of good usage. How 
admirably was a real void in the vocabulary filled by the 
word “squatter,” when it was first coined! The man who 
first uttered it gave vivid expression to an idea which had 
existed vaguely in the brains of thousands; and it was 
hardly spoken before it was on every tongue. Coleridge 
observes truly that any new word expressing a fact or 
relationship, not expressed by any other word in the lan¬ 
guage, is a new organ of thought; and how true is this 
of the terms “solidarity” (as in the phrase “solidarity 
of the peoples”), and “international,” both of which ex¬ 
press novel and characteristic conceptions of our own 
century. The latter word is a coinage of Jeremy Bentham, 
to whom we are also indebted for “ codify,” “ maximise,” 
and “ minimise.” The little word “ its ” had to force its 
way into the language, against the opposition of “ correct ” 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


431 


speakers and writers, on the ground of its apparent analogy 
with the other English possessives. 

Dr. Johnson objected to the word “dun” in Lady Mac¬ 
beth’s famous soliloquy, declaring that the “ efficacy of this 
invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now 
seldom heard but in the stable:—” 

“ Come, thick night, 

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.” 

It was a notion of the great critic and lexicographer, with 
which his mind was long haunted, that the language should 
be refined and fixed so as finally to exclude all rustic and 
vulgar elements from the authorized vocabulary of the let¬ 
tered and polite. Dryden had hinted at the establishment 
of an academy for this purpose, and Swift thought the Gov¬ 
ernment “ should devise some means for ascertaining and 
fixing the language forever ,” after the necessary alterations 
should be made in it. 

If it were possible to exclude needed new words from a 
language, the French Academy would have succeeded in its 
attempts to do so, consisting as it did of the chief scholars of 
France. Not content with crushing political liberty, Rich¬ 
elieu sought to become autocrat of the French language. 
No word was to be uttered anywhere in the realm until he 
had countersigned it. But in spite of all the efforts of his 
Academy to exercise a despotic authority over the French 
tongue, new words have continually forced their way in, 
and so they will continue to do while the French nation 
maintains its vitality, in spite of the protests of all the 
purists and academicians in France. “ They that will fight 
custom with grammar,” says Montaigne, “are fools”; and, 
with the limitations to be hereafter stated, the remark is 
just, and still more true of those who triumphantly appeal 


432 


words; their use and abuse. 


against custom to the dictionary, which is not merely a 
home for living words, but a cemetery for the dead. 

Even slang words, after long knocking, will often gain 
admission into a language, like pardoned outlaws received 
into the body of respectable citizens. We need not add to 
these, words coined in his lofty moods by the poet, who is a 
maker by the very right of his name. That creative energy 
which distinguishes him,—“ the high-flying liberty of con¬ 
ceit proper to the poet,’’—will, of course, display itself 
here, and the all-fusing imagination will at once, as Trench 
has remarked, suggest and justify audacities in speech 
which would not be tolerated from creeping prose-writers. 
Great liberties may be allowed, too, within certain bounds, 
to the idiosyncrasies of all great writers. We love the rug¬ 
ged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its 
branches, better than the smoothly clipped uniformity of 
the Dutch yew tree. Carlyleisms may therefore be tolerated 
from the master, though not from the umbrce that spaniel 
him at the heels, and feebly echo his singularities and oddi¬ 
ties. A style that has no smack or flavor of the man that 
uses it is a tasteless style. But there is a limit even to the 
liberty of great thinkers in coining words. It must not de¬ 
generate into license. Coleridge was a skilful mint-master 
of words, yet not all his genius can reconcile us to such ex¬ 
pressions as the following, in a letter to Sir Humphrey 
Davy: “I was a well meaning sutor who had ultra-crepi- 
dated with more zeal than wisdom.” 

No one would hesitate to place Isaac Barrow among the 
greatest masters of the English tongue; yet the weighty 
thoughts which his words represented did not prevent 
many of the trial-pieces which he coined in his verbal mint 
from being returned on his hands. Who knows the mean- 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


433 


ing of such words as “ a voce,” “acquist,” “extund”? Sir 
Thomas Browne abounds in such hyperlatinistic expressions 
as “ bivious,” “ quodlibetically,” “ cunctation,” to which 
even his gorgeous rhetoric does not reconcile the reader. 
Charles Lamb has “agnise” and “bourgeon.” Coleridge 
invents “ extroitive,” “ retroitive,” “ influencive ”; Bentley, 
“ commentitious,” “negoce,” “exscribe.” Sydney Smith 
was continually coining words, some of them compounds 
from the homely Saxon idiom, others big-wig classical epi¬ 
thets, devised with scholar-like precision, and exceedingly 
ludicrous in their effect. Thus he speaks of “ frugiverous” 
children, of “ inastigophorous” schoolmasters, of “fuga¬ 
cious” or “plumigerous” captains; of “lachrymal and 
suspirious” clergymen; of people who are “simious,” 
and people who are “anserous”; he enriches the lan- 
gauge with the expressive hybrid, “ Foolometer ”; and 
he characterizes the September sins of the English by 
the awful name of “ perdricide.” In the early ages of our 
literature, when the language was less fixed, and there were 
few recognized standards of expression, writers coined words 
without license, supplying the place of correct terms, when 
they did not occur to their minds, by analogy and invention. 
But a bill must not only be drawn by the word-maker; it 
must also be accepted. The Emperor Tiberius was very 
properly told that he might give citizenship to men, but not 
to words. All innovations in speech, every new term intro¬ 
duced, should harmonize with the general principles of the 
language. No new phrase should be admitted which is not 
consonant with its peculiar genius, or which does violence 
to its fundamental integrity. Nor should any form of 
expression be tolerated that violates the universal laws of 
language. As Henry Rogers has well said, a philosophical 


434 


words; their use and abuse. 


mind will consider that, whatever deflection may have taken 
place in the original principles of a language, whatever 
modification of form it may have undergone, it is, at each 
period of its history, the product of a slow accumulation and 
countless multitude of associations, which can neither be 
hastily formed nor hastily dismissed; that these associations 
extend even to the modes of spelling and pronouncing, of 
inflecting and combining words; and that anything which 
does violence to such associations impairs, for the time, at 
least, the power of the language. 

Even good usage itself is but a proximate and strongly 
presumptive test of purity. Custom is not an absolute 
despotism, though it approaches very nearly to that char¬ 
acter. Its decisions are generally authoritative; but, as 
there are extreme measures which even oriental despots 
cannot put into execution without endangering the safety 
of their possessions, so* there are things which custom can¬ 
not do without endangering the fixity and purity, of lan¬ 
guage. If grammatical monstrosities exist in a language, 
a correct taste will shun them, as it does physical deformi¬ 
ties in the arts of design. Dean Alford defends some of 
his own indefensible expressions by citing the authority 
of the Scripture; but authority for the most vicious forms 
of speech can be found in all our writers, not excepting 
King James’s translators,— as Mr. Harrison has shown by 
hundreds of examples in his work on “ The English Lan¬ 
guage.” Take, for example, the following sentence, or 
part of a sentence, from so great a writer as Dean Swift: 
“ Breaking a constitution by the very same errors, that 
so many have been broke before.” Here, in a sentence of 
only fifteen words, we have three grammatical errors, 
glaring, and, in such a writer, unpardonable. We smile 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


435 


at the rustic ignorance which has engraved on a Hamp¬ 
shire tombstone such lines as 

“ Him shall never come again to we ; 

But us shall one day surely go to he /” 

but is this couplet a whit more ungrammatical than Scott’s 
“I know not whom else are expected,” in “the Pirate”; 
or Southey’s sentence in “ the Doctor,” “ Gentle reader, let 
you and I, in like manner, endeavor to improve the en¬ 
closure of the Carr;” or Professor Aytoun’s 

“ But it were vain for you and I 
In single fight our strength to try.” 

A writer in “ Blackwood ” affirms that, “ with the excep¬ 
tion of Wordsworth, there is not one celebrated author of 
this day who has written two pages consecutively without 
some flagrant impropriety in the grammar;” and the 
statement, we believe, is undercharged. The usage, there¬ 
fore, of a good writer is only prima facie evidence of the 
correctness of a disputed word or phrase; for he may have 
used the word carelessly or inadvertently, and it is alto¬ 
gether probable that, were his attention called to it, he 
would be prompt to admit his error. It has been re¬ 
marked that “nowadays” and “had have” meet all the 
conditions of good usage, being reputable, national, and 
present; but one is a solecism, the other a barbarism. 
Again, if the writer is an old writer, like Shakespeare, 
Milton, Dryden, or Addison, his authority must always be 
received with caution, and with increasing caution as we 
recede from the age in which he flourished. The great 
changes which our language has undergone within even 
a hundred years, show that the writers of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries are unsafe guides for the nine¬ 
teenth, unless they are corroborated by contemporary 


436 


words; their use and abuse. 


usage. Let the English language be enriched in the 
spirit, and according to the principles of which we have 
spoken, and it will be, not a tank, but a living stream, 
casting out everything effete and impure, refreshed by new 
sources of inspiration and wealth, keeping pace with the 
stately march of the ages, and still retaining much of its 
original sweetness, expression and force. 

It is our intention in this chapter, not to notice all the 
improprieties of speech that merit censure,— to do which 
would require volumes,— but to criticise, some of those 
which most frequently offend the ear of the scholar in this 
country. The term impropriety we shall use, not merely 
in the strictly rhetorical sense of the word, but in the 
popular meaning, to include in it all inaccuracies of speech, 
whether offences against etymology, lexicography, or syn¬ 
tax. To pillory such offences, to point out the damage 
which they inflict upon our language, and to expose the 
moral obliquity which often lurks beneath them, is, we 
believe, the duty of every scholar who knows how closely 
purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied to 
purity of thought and rectitude of action. To say that 
every person who aspires to be esteemed a gentleman 
should carefully shun all barbarisms, solecisms, and other 
faults in his speech, is to utter the merest truism. The 
man who habitually deviates from the custom of his 
country in expressing his thoughts, is hardly less ridicu¬ 
lous than one who walks the streets in a Spanish cloak 
or a Roman toga. An accurate knowledge and a correct 
and felicitous use of words are, of themselves, almost sure 
proofs of good breeding. No doubt it marks a weak mind 
to care more for the casket than for the jewel it contains, 
— to prefer elegantly turned sentences to sound sense; 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


437 


but sound sense always acquires additional value when 
expressed in pure English. Moreover, he who carefully 
studies accuracy of expression, the proper choice and 
arrangement of words in any language, will be also 
advancing toward accuracy of thought, as well as toward 
propriety and energy of speech; “for divers philosophers 
hold,” says Shakespeare, “ that the lip is parcel of the 
mind.” Few things are more ludicrous than the blunders 
by which even persons moving in refined society often 
betray the grossest ignorance of very common words. A 
story is told in England of an over-classical Member of 
Parliament, who, not knowing or forgetting that “omni¬ 
bus ” is the plural of the Latin “ omnis ,” and means “ for 
all,”—that is, a vehicle in which people of all ranks may 
sit together,— spoke of “two omnibi.” There are hun¬ 
dreds of educated persons who speak of the “ banister ” of 
a staircase, when they mean “balustrade,” or “baluster”; 
there is no such word as “ banister.” There are hundreds 
of others who never eat anything, not even an apple, but 
always partake , even though they consume all the food 
before them; and even the London “Times,” in one of its 
issues, spoke of a jury “immersing” a defendant in dam¬ 
ages. We once knew an old lady in a New England village, 
quite aristocratic in her feelings and habits, who com¬ 
plained to her physician that “ her blood seemed to have all 
stackpoled and we have heard of another descendant of 
Mrs. Malaprop, who, in answer to the question whether she 
would be sure to keep an appointment, replied, “ I will 
come ,—alluding it does not rain.” 

Goldsmith is one of the most charming writers in our 
language; yet in his “History of England,” the following 
statement occurs in a chapter on the reign of Elizabeth. 


438 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


Speaking of a communication to Mary, Queen of Scots, he 
says: “This they effected by conveying their letters to her 
by means of a brewer, that supplied the family ivith ale 
through a chink in the ivall of her apartment .” A queer 
brewer that, to supply his ale through a chink in the wall! 
Again, we read in Goldsmith’s “ History of Greece”: “ He 
wrote to that distinguished philosopher in terms polite and 
flattering, begging of him to come and undertake his edu¬ 
cation, and bestow on him those useful lessons of mag¬ 
nanimity and virtue which every great man ought to 
possess, and which his numerous avocations rendered im¬ 
possible for him.” In this sentence the pronoun he is 
employed six times, under different forms; and as, in each 
case, it may refer to either of two antecedents, the mean¬ 
ing, but for our knowledge of the facts, would be involved 
in hopeless confusion. First, the pronoun stands for Philip, 
then for Aristotle, then for Alexander, again for Alexander, 
and then twice for Philip. A still greater offender against 
clearness in the use of pronouns is Lord Clarendon; e.g., 
“ On which, with the king’s and queen’s so ample promises 
to him (the Treasurer) so few hours before, conferring the 
place upon another, and the Duke of York’s manner of 
receiving him (the Treasurer), after he (the Chancellor) had 
been shut up with him (the Duke), as he (the Treasurer) 
was informed might very well excuse him (the Treasurer) 
from thinking he (the Chancellor) had some share in the 
effront he (the Treasurer) had undergone.” It would be 
hard to match this passage even in the writings of the 
humblest penny-a-liner; it is “confusion worse con¬ 
founded.” 

Solecisms so glaring as these may not often disfigure 
men’s writing or speech; and some of the faults we shall 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


439 


notice may seem so petty and microscopic that the reader 
may deem us “ word-catchers that live on syllables.” But 
it is the little foxes that spoil the grapes, in the familiar 
speech of the people as well as in Solomon’s vineyards; 
and, as a garment may be honey-combed by moths, so the 
fine texture of a language may be gradually destroyed, and 
its strength impaired, by numerous and apparently insig¬ 
nificant solecisms and inaccuracies. Nicety in the use of 
particles is one of the most decisive marks of skill and 
scholarship in a writer; and the accuracy, beauty, and 
force of many a fine passage in English literature depend 
largely on the use of the pronouns, prepositions, and arti¬ 
cles. How emphatic and touching does the following 
enumeration become through the repetition of one 'petty 
word! “By thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy cross 
and passion; by thy precious death and burial; by thy glo¬ 
rious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of 
the Holy Ghost.” How much pathos is added to the prayer 
of the publican by the proper translation of the Greek 
article,— “ God be merciful to me the sinner!” 

De Quincey strikingly observes: “ People that have 
practised composition as much, and with as vigilant an 
eye as myself, know also, by thousands of cases, how infi¬ 
nite is the disturbance caused in the logic of a thought 
by the mere position of a word as despicable as the word 
even. A mote that is in itself invisible, shall darken the 
august faculty of sight in a human eye,— the heavens 
shall be hid by a wretched atom that dares not show itself, 
— and the station of a syllable shall cloud the judgment 
of a council. Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling 
to the right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall 
confound a system,” It is a fact well known to lawyers, 


440 words; their use and abuse. 

that the omission or misplacement of a monosyllable in a 
legal document has rendered many a man bankrupt. Fif¬ 
teen years ago an expensive lawsuit arose in England, on 
the meaning of two phrases in the will of a deceased 
nobleman. In the one he gives his property “ to my 
brother and to his children in succession”; in the other, 
“ to my brother and his children in succession.” This 
diversity gives rise to quite different interpretations. In 
another case, by omitting the letter s in a legal document, 
an English attorney is said to have inflicted on a client a 
loss of £30,000. 

In language, as in the fine arts, there is but one way 
to attain to excellence, and that is by study of the most 
faultless models. As the air and manner of a gentleman 
can be acquired only by living constantly in good society, 
so grace and purity of expression must be attained by a 
familiar acquaintance with the standard authors. It is 
astonishing how rapidly we may by this practice enrich 
our vocabularies, and how speedily we imitate and un¬ 
consciously reproduce in our language the niceties and 
delicacies of expression which have charmed us in a favor¬ 
ite author. Like the sheriff whom Rufus Choate satirized 
for having “ overworked the participle,” most persons 
make one word act two, ten or a dozen parts; yet there 
is hardly any man who may not, by moderate painstaking, 
learn to express himself in terms as precise, if not as 
vivid, as those of Pitt, whom Fox so praised for his accu¬ 
racy.* The account which Lord Chesterfield gives of the 
method by which he became one of the most elegant and 
polished talkers and orators of Europe, strikingly shows 
what miracles may be achieved by care and practice. 


* See page 2G. 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


441 


Early in life he determined not to speak one word in con¬ 
versation which was not the fittest he could recall; and he 
charged his son never to deliver the commonest order to a 
servant, but in the best language he could find, and with 
the best utterance. For years Chesterfield wrote down 
every brilliant passage he met with in his reading, and 
translated it into French, or, if it was in a foreign lan¬ 
guage, into English. By this practice a certain elegance 
became habitual to him, and it would have given him more 
trouble, he says, to express himself inelegantly than he 
had ever taken to avoid the defect. Lord Bolingbroke, 
who had an imperial dominion over all the resources of 
expression, and could talk all day just as perfectly as he 
wrote, told Chesterfield that he owed the power to the 
same cause,— an early and habitual attention to his style. 
When Boswell expressed to Johnson his surprise at the 
constant force and propriety of the Doctor’s words, the 
latter replied that he had long been accustomed to clothe 
his thoughts in the fittest words he could command, and 
thus a vivid and exact phraseology had become habitual. 

It has been affirmed by a high authority that a knowl¬ 
edge of English grammar is rather a matter of conven¬ 
ience as a nomenclature,— a medium of thought and dis¬ 
cussion about the language,— than a guide to the actual 
use of it; and that it is as impossible to acquire the 
complete command of our own tongue by the study of 
grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by 
attending a course of lectures on anatomy. “Undoubt¬ 
edly I have found,” says Sir Philip Sydney, “ in divers smal 
learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some pos¬ 
sessors of learning; of which I can ghesse no other cause, 
but that the courtier following that which by practice 


442 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it 
not) doth according to art, though not by art; where the 
other, using art to shew art, and not to hide art (as in 
these cases he should doe), flietli from nature, and indeed 
abuseth art.” 

Let it not be inferred, however, from all this that 
grammatical knowledge is unne©essary. A man of refined 
taste may detect many errors by the ear; but there are 
other errors, equally gross, that have not a harsh sound, 
and consequently cannot be detected without a knowledge 
of the rules that are violated. Besides, it often happens, 
as we have already seen, that even the purest writers 
inadvertently allow some inaccuracies to creep into their 
productions. The works of Addison, Swift, Bentley, Pope, 
Young, Blair, Hume, Gibbon, and even Johnson, that levi¬ 
athan of literature, are disfigured by numberless instances 
of slovenliness of style. Cobbett, in his “Grammar of the 
English Language,” says that he noted down about two 
hundred improprieties of language in Johnson’s “Lives of 
the Poets” alone; and he points out as many more, at 
least, in the “ Rambler,” which the author says he revised 
and corrected with extraordinary care. Sydney Smith, one 
of the finest stylists of this century, has not a few flagrant 
solecisms; and, strange to say, some of them occur in a 
passage in which he is trying to show that the English 
language “may be learned, practically and unerringly ,” 
without a knowledge of grammatical :mles. “ When,” he 
asks, “do we ever find a well educated Englishman or 
Frenchman embarrassed by an ignorance of the grammar 
of their respective languages? They first learn it prac¬ 
tically and unerringly; and then, if they chose (choose?) 
to look back and smile at the idea of having proceeded 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


443 


by a number of rules, without knowing one of them by 
heart, or being conscious that they had any rule at all, 
this is a philosophical amusement; but who ever thinks 
of learning the grammar of their own tongue, before they 
are very good grammarians!” The best refutation of the 
reasoning in this passage is found in the bad grammar 
of the passage itself. 

Even the literary'detectives, who spend their time in 
hunting down and showing up the mistakes of others, 
enjoy no immunity from error. Harrison, in his excellent 
work on “ The English Language,” written expressly to 
point out some of the most prevalent solecisms in its 
literature, has such solecisms as the following: “The 
authority of Addison, in matters of grammar; of Bentley, 
who never made the English grammar his study; of 
Bolingbroke, Pope, and others, are as nothing.” Breen, 
who in his “Modern English Literature: its Blemishes and 
Defects,” has shown uncommon critical acumen, writes 
thus: “There is no writer so addicted to this blunder as 
Isaac DTsraeli.” Again, in criticising a faulty expression 
of Alison, he sins almost as grievously himself by saying: 
“It would have been correct to say: ‘Suchet’s administra¬ 
tion was incomparably less oppressive than that of any of 
the French generals in the Peninsula.’ ” This reminds 
one of the statement that “ Noah and his family outlived 
all who lived before the flood,”—that is, they outlived 
themselves. Latham, in his profound treatise on “ The 
English Language,” has such sentences as this: “The 
logical and historical analysis of a language generally in 
some degree coincides .” Here the syntax is correct; but 
the sense is sacrificed, since a coincidence implies at least 
two things. In the London “Saturday Review,” which 


444 


WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE. 


“is nothing if not critical,” we find such a cacophonous 
sentence as the following: “In personal relations Mr. 
Bright is probab/y general/// kind/?/.” Blair’s “Rhetoric” 
has been used as a text-book for half a century; yet it 
swarms with errors of grammar and rhetoric, against 
almost every law of which he has sinned. Moon, in his 
review of Alford, has pointed out hundreds of faults in 
“ The Dean’s English,” as censurable as any which he has 
censured; and newspaper critics, at home and abroad, 
have pointed out scores of obscurations, as well as of 
glaring faults, in Moon. 

It has been well observed by Professor Marsh that most 
men would be unable to produce a good caricature of 
their own individual speech, and that the shibboleth of 
our personal dialect is unknown to ourselves, however 
ready we may be to remark the characteristic phraseology 
of others. “ It is a mark of weakness, of poverty of speech, 
or, at least, of bad taste, to continue the use of pet words, 
or other peculiarities of language, after we have once 
become conscious of them as such.” There are certain 
stock phrases, also, which, though not objectionable in 
themselves, have been so worn to shreds by continual 
repetition in speech and in the press, that a man of 
taste will shun using them as instinctively as he shuns a 
solecism. A few examples are the following: “ History 
repeats itself,” “The irony of fate,” “That goes without 
saying,” “Ample scope and verge enough,” “ We are free 
to confess,” “Conspicuous by its absence,” “The courage 
of his convictions.” 

We proceed to notice some of the common improprieties 
of speech. Many of them are of recent origin, others are 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


445 


old offenders that have been tried and condemned at the 
bar of criticism again and again:— 

But , for that, or if. Example: “I have no doubt but 
he will come to-night.” “ I should not wonder but that 
was the case.” 

Agriculturalist , for agriculturist, is an impropriety of 
the grossest sort. Nine-tenths of our writers on agricul¬ 
ture use the former expression. They might as well say 
geologicalist, instead of geologist, or chemicalist, instead 
of chemist. 

Deduction , for induction. Induction is the mental pro¬ 
cess by which we ascend to the discovery of general truths. 
deduction is the process by which the law governing par¬ 
ticulars is derived from a knowledge of the law governing 
the class to which particulars belong. 

Illy is a gross barbarism, quite common in these days, 
especially with newly fledged poets. There is no such word 
as illy in the language. The noun, adjective, and adverb, 
are ill. 

Plenty , for plentiful. Stump politicians tell us that the 
adoption of a certain measure “ will make money plenty in 
every man’s pocket.” 

I have got , for I have. Hardly any other word in the 
language is so abused as the word get. A man says, “ I 
have got a cold”; he means simply, “I have a cold.” 
Another says that a certain lady “ has got a fine head of 
hair,” which may be true if the hair is false, but it is prob¬ 
ably intended as a compliment. A third says: “ I have got 
to leave the city for New York this evening,” meaning only 
that he has to leave the city, etc. Nine out of ten ladies 
who enter a dry-goods store, ask, “ Have you got ” such or 
such an article? If such a phrase as “ I have possess ” were 


446 


words; their use and abuse. 


used, all noses would turn up together; but “ I have got,” 
when used to signify “ I have,” is equally a departure from 
propriety. A man may say, “ I have got more than my 
neighbor has, because I have been more industrious ”; but 
he cannot with propriety say, “ I have got a long nose,” 
however long his nose may be, unless it be an artificial one. 
Even so able a writer as Prof. Whitney expresses himself 
thus: “ Who ever yet got through learning his mother 
tongue, and could say, ‘ The work is done ’?” 

Recommend. This word is used in a strange sense by 
many persons. Political conventions often pass resolutions 
beginning thus: “ Resolved, that the Republicans (or Dem¬ 
ocrats) of this county be recommended to meet,” etc. 

Differ with is often used, in public debate, instead of 
differ from. Example: “I differ with the learned gentle¬ 
man, entirely,”—which is intended to mean, that the 
speaker holds views different from those of the gentleman; 
not that he agrees with the gentleman in differing from 
the views of a third person. Different to is often spoken 
and written in England, and occasionally in this country, 
instead of different from. An example of this occurs in 
Queen Victoria’s book, edited by Mr. Helps. 

Corporeal, for corporal, is a gross vulgarism, the use of 
which at this day should almost subject an educated man to 
the kind of punishment which the latter adjective desig¬ 
nates. Corporeal means, having a body corporal, or belong¬ 
ing to a body. 

Wearies, for is wearied. Example: “The reader soon 
wearies of such stuff.” 

Any how is an exceedingly vulgar phrase, though used 
even by so elegant a writer as Blair. Example: “If the 
damage can be any how repaired,” etc. The use of this 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


447 


expression, in any manner, by one who professes to write 
and speak the English tongue with purity, is unpardonable. 

It were, for it is. Example: “It were a consummation 
devoutly to be wished for.” Dr. Chalmers says: “It were 
an intolerable spectacle, even to the inmates of a felon’s 
cell, did they behold one of their fellows in the agonies of 
death.” For ivere put would be, and for did put should. 

Doubt is a word much abused by a class of would-be 
laconic speakers, who affect an Abernethy-like brevity of 
language. “ I doubt such is the true meaning of the Con¬ 
stitution,” say our “great expounders,” looking wondrous 
wise. They mean, “ I doubt whether,” etc. 

Lie, lay. Gross blunders are committed in the use of 
these words; e.g., “He laid down on the grass,” instead of 
“he laid himself down,” or, “he lay down.” The verb to 
lie (to be in a horizontal position) is lay in the preterite. 
The book does not lay on the table; it lies there. Some 
years ago an old lady consulted an eccentric Boston physi¬ 
cian, and, in describing her disease, said: “The trouble, 
Doctor, is that I can neither lay nor set.” “ Then, Madam,” 
was the reply, “I would respectfully suggest the propriety 
of roosting.” 

“ Like I did is a gross western and southern vul¬ 
garism for “ as I did.” “You will feel like lightning ought 
to strike you,” said a learned Doctor of Divinity at a meet¬ 
ing in the East. Even so well informed a writer as R. W. 
Dale, D.D., says: “A man’s style, if it is a good one, fits 
his thought like a good coat fits his figure.” Like is a 
preposition, and should not be used as a conjunction. 

Less, for fewer. “Not less than fifty persons.” Less 
relates to quantity; fewer, to number. 


448 


words: their use and abuse. 


Balance , for remainder. “ I’ll take the balance of the 
goods.” 

Revolt , for are revolting to. “ Such doctrines revolt us.” 

Alone , for only. Quackenboss, in his “ Course of Com¬ 
position and Rhetoric,” says, in violation of one of his own 
rules: “This means of communication, as well as that 
which follows, is employed by man alone.” Onlij is often 
misplaced in a sentence. Miss Braddon says, in the pros¬ 
pectus of “ Belgravia,” her English magazine, that “ it will 
be written in good English. In its pages papers of sterling 
merit will only appear.” A poor beginning this! She 
means that “only papers of sterling merit will appear.” 
Bolingbroke says: “Believe me, the providence of God has 
established such an order in the world, that, of all that 
belongs to us, the least valuable parts can alone fall under 
the will of others.” The last clause should be, “ only the 
least valuable parts can fall under the will of others.” 
The word merely is misplaced in the following sentence 
from a collegiate address on eloquence: “It is true of men 
as of God, that words merely meet no response,— only such 
as are loaded with thought.” 

Likewise , for also. Also classes together . things or 
qualities, whilst likewise couples actions or states of being. 
“ He did it likewise,” means he did it in like manner. An 
English Quaker was once asked by a lawyer whether he 
could tell the difference between also and likewise. “ 0, 
yes,” was the reply, “Erskine is a great lawyer; his talents 
are universally admired. You are a lawyer also, but not 
like-«me.” 

Avocation , for vocation, or calling. A man’s avocations 
are those pursuits or amusements which engage his atten- 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


449 


tion when he is “ called away from ” his regular business 
or profession,—as music, fishing, boating. 

Crushed out , for crushed. “ The rebellion has been 
crushed out.” Why out , rather than in? If you tread 
on a worm, you simply crush him,—that is all. It ought 
to satisfy the most vengeful foe of “the rebels” that they 
have been crushed, without adding the needless cruelty of 
crushing them out , which is to be as vindictive as Alexander, 
of whom Dryden tells us that 

“ Thrice he routed all his foes, 

And thrice he slew the slain.” 

Of , for from. Example: “Received of John Smith fifty 
dollars.” Usage, perhaps, sanctions this. 

At all is a needless expletive, which is employed by 
many writers of what may be called the forcible-feeble 
school. For example: “The coach was upset, but, strange 
to say, not a passenger received the slightest injury at all.” 
“ It is not at all strange.” 

But that , for that. This error is quite common among 
those who think themselves above learning anything more 
from the dictionary and grammar. Trench says: “He 
never doubts but that he knows their intention.’’' A worse 
error is hut what , as in the reply of Mr. Jobling, of “ Bleak 
House ”: “ Thank you, Guppy, I don’t know but what I will 
take a marrow pudding.” “ He would not believe but what 
I was joking.” 

Convene is used by many persons in a strange sense. 
“This road will convene the public.” 

Evidence is a word much abused by learned judges and 
attorneys,— being continually used for testimony. Evi¬ 
dence relates to the convictive view of any one’s mind; 
testimony , to the knowledge of another concerning some 


450 


words; their use and abuse. 


fact. The evidence in a case is often the reverse of the 
testimony. 

Had have. E.g. The London “Times” says “Sir 
Wilfred Lawson had better have kept to his original pro¬ 
posal.” This is a very low vulgarism, notwithstanding it 
has the authority of Addison. It is quite common to say 
“Had I have seen him,” “Had you have known it,” etc. 
We can say, “ I have been,” “ I had been,” but what sort 
of a tense is had have been? 

Had ought , had better , had rather. All these expressions 
are absurdities, no less gross than liisn, tother, baint , theirn. 
No doubt there is plenty of good authority for had better 
and had rather; but how can future action be expressed by 
a verb that signifies past and completed possession? 

At , for by. E. g., “ Sales at auction.” The word auc¬ 
tion signifies a manner of sale; and this signification seems 
to require the preposition by. 

The above , as an adjective. “ The above extract is suffi¬ 
cient to verify my assertion.” “ I fully concur in the above 
statement” (the statement above, or the foregoing state¬ 
ment). Charles Lamb speaks of “ the above boys and the 
below boys.” 

Then, as an adjective. “ The then King of Holland.” 
This error, to which even educated men are addicted, 
springs from a desire of brevity; but verbal economy is 
not commendable when it violates the plainest rules of 
language. 

Final completion. As every completion is final, the 
adjective is superfluous. A similar objection applies to 
first beginning. Similar to these superabundant forms of 
expression is another, in which universal and all are brought 
into the same construction. A man is said to be “ univer- 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


451 


sally esteemed by all who know him.” If all esteem him, 
he is, of course, universally esteemed; and the converse is 
equally true. 

Party , for man or woman. This error, so common in 
England, is becoming more and more prevalent here. An 
English witness once testified that he saw “ a short party ” 
(meaning person) “ go over the bridge.” Another Eng¬ 
lishman, who had looked at a portrait of St. Paul in a 
gallery at Florence, being asked his opinion of the picture, 
said that he thought “ the party was very well executed.” 
It is hardly necessary to say that it takes several persons to 
make a party. 

Celebrity is sometimes applied to celebrated persons, 
instead of being used abstractly; e.g., “Several celebrities 
are at the Palmer House.” 

Equanimity of mind. As equanimity (cequus animus ) 
means evenness of mind, why should “ of mind ” be re¬ 
peated? “ Anxiety of mind” is less objectionable, but the 
first word is sufficient. 

Don't for doesn’t, or does not. Even so scholarly a 
divine as the Rev. Dr. Bellows, of New York, employs 
this vulgarism four times in an article in the “ Inde¬ 
pendent.” “ A man,” he says, “ who knows only his fam¬ 
ily and neighbors, don’t know them; a man who only 
knows the present don’t know that. . . . Many a man, 
with a talent for making money, don’t know whether he 
is rich or poor, because he don’t understand bookkeeping,” 
etc. 

Predicate , for found. E.g., “His argument was pred¬ 
icated on the assumption,” etc. 

Try , for make. E.g., “ Try the experiment.” 

Superior, for able, virtuous, etc. E.g., “ He is a supe- 


452 


words; their use and abuse. 


rior man.” Not less vulgar is the expression, “ an inferior 
man,” for a man of small abilities. 

Deceiving, for trying to deceive. E.g., a person says 
to another, “ You are deceiving me,” when he means 
exactly the opposite, namely, “ You are trying to deceive 
me, but you cannot succeed, for your trickery is trans¬ 
parent.” 

The masses , for the people generally. “The masses 
must be educated.” The masses of what? 

In our midst. This vulgarism is continually heard in 
prayer-meetings, and from the lips of Doctors of Divinity, 
though its incorrectness has been exposed again and again. 
The second chapter in Prof. Scheie De Yere’s excellent 
“Studies in English” begins thus: “When a man rises 
to eminence in our midst,” etc.,— which is doubtless one 
of the few errors in his book quas incuria fudit. The 
possessive pronoun can properly be used only to indicate 
possession or appurtenance. “ The midst ” of a company 
or society is not a thing belonging or appurtenant to the 
company, or to the individuals composing it. It is a mere 
term of relation of an adverbial, not of a substantive 
character, and is an intensified form of expression for 
among. Would any one say, “In our middle”? 

Excessively , for exceedingly. Ladies often complain 
that the weather is “ excessively hot,” thereby implying 
that they do not object to the heat, but only to the excess 
of heat. They mean simply that the weather is very hot. 

Either is applicable only to two objects; and the same 
remark is true of neither and both. “ Either of the 
three” is wrong; so is this,— “Ten burglars broke into 
the house, but neither of them could be recognized.” Say, 
“ none of them,” or 11 not one of them could be recognized.” 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


453 


Either is sometimes improperly used for each; e.g., “ On 
either side of the river was the tree of life,”— Rev. xxi, 2. 
Here it is not meant that if you do not find that the 
tree of life was on this side, it was on that; but that 
the tree of life was on each side,— on this side, and on 
that. The proper use of either was vindicated some years 
ago in England, by the Court of Chancery. A certain 
testator left property, the disposition of which was affected 
by “ the death of either ” of two persons. One learned 
counsel contended that the word “ either ” meant both; 
in support of this view he quoted Richardson, Webster, 
Chaucer, Dryden, Southey, the history of the crucifixion, 
and a passage from the Revelation. The learned judge 
suggested that there was an old song in the “ Beggar’s 
Opera,” known to all, which took the opposite view: 

“How happy could I be with either, 

Were t’other dear charmer away.” 

In pronouncing judgment, the judge dissented entirely 
from the argument of the learned counsel. “Either,” he 
said, “ means one of two, and does not mean both.” 
Though occasionally, by poets and some other writers, the 
word was employed to signify both, it did not in the case 
before the court. 

Whether is a contraction of ivhich of either , and 
therefore cannot be correctly applied to more than two 
objects. 

Never, for ever. E.g., “ Charm he never so wisely ”; 
“Let the offence be of never so high a nature.” Many 
grammarians approve of this use of never; but its cor¬ 
rectness, to say the least, is doubtful. In such sentences 
as these, “ He was deaf to the voice of the charmer, charm 
he ever so wisely,” “ Were it ever so fine a day, I would 


454 


words; their use ahd abuse. 


not go out,” the word ever is an adverb of degree, and has 
nothing to do with time. “ If I take ever so little of this 
drug, it will kill me,” is equivalent to “ however little,” 
or “ how little soever I take of this drug, it will kill me.” 
Harrison well says on this point: “Let any one translate 
one of these phrases into another language, and he will 
find that ‘ ever ’ presents itself as a term expressive of de¬ 
gree, and not of time at all. ‘ Charm he ever so wisely ’: 
Quamvis incantandi sit peritus aut peritissimus .” 

Seldom , or never is a common vulgarism. Say “ seldom, 
it ever. 

Sit, sat, are much abused words. It is said that the 
brilliant Irish lawyer, Curran, once carelessly observed in 
court, “ an action lays,” and the judge corrected him by 
remarking: “Lies, Mr. Curran,— hens lay;” but when 
afterward the judge ordered a counsellor to “set down,” 
Curran retaliated, “ Sit down, your honor,— hens set.” 
The retort was characterized by more wit than truth. 
Hens do not set; they sit. It is not unusual to hear per¬ 
sons say, “The coat sets well”; “The wind sets fair.” 
Sits is the proper word. The preterite of sit is often 
incorrectly used for that of set ; e.g., “ He sat off for 
Boston.” 

From thence, from ivhence. As the adverbs thence and 
whence literally supply the place of a noun and preposi¬ 
tion, there is a solecism in employing a preposition in 
conjunction with them. 

Conduct. In conversation, this verb is frequently used 
without the personal pronoun; as, “he conducts well,” 
for “ he conducts himself well.” 

Least, for less. “ Of two evils, choose the least.” 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OP SPEECH. 


455 


A confirmed invalid. Can weakness be strong? If not, 
how can a man be a confirmed, or strengthened, invalid? 

Proposition, for proposal. This is not a solecism, but, 
as a univocal word is preferable to one that is equivocal, 
proposal , for a thing offered or proposed, is better than 
proposition. Strictly, a proposal is something offered to 
be done; a proposition is something submitted to one’s 
consideration. E.g ., “He rejected the proposal of his 
friend;” “he demonstrated the fifth proposition in Euclid.” 

Previous , for previously. “ Previous to my leaving 
America.” 

Appreciates , for rises in value. “ Gold appreciated 
yesterday.” Even the critical London Athenaeum is guilty 
of this solecism. It says: “A book containing personal 
reminiscences of one of our great schools appeals to a public 
limited, no doubt, but certain, and sure to appreciate .” 

Proven for proved, and plead for pleaded, are clearly 
vulgarisms. 

Bound , for ready or determined. “ I am bound to do 
it.” We may say properly that a ship is “ bound to Liv¬ 
erpool”; but in that case we do not employ, as many 
suppose, the past participle of the verb to bind , but the 
old northern participial adjective, buinn , from the verb, 
at bua, signifying “to make ready, or prepare.” The 
term is strictly a nautical one, and to employ it in a sense 
that unites the significations both of buinn and the English 
participle bound from bind, is a plain abuse of language. 

No, for not. E.g., “ Whether I am there or no.” 
Cowper writes: 

“I will not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau, 

Whether birds confabulate or no.” 

By supplying the ellipsis, we shall see that not is here 


456 


words; their use and abuse. 


the proper word. “ Whether birds confabulate, or do not 
confabulate,” “ whether I am there, or not there.” No 
never properly qualifies a verb. 

Such for so. E.g., “I never saw such a high spire.” 
This means, “ 1 never saw a high spire of such a form,” 
or “ of such architecture ” whereas the speaker, in u all 
probability, means only that he never saw so high a spire. 
Such denotes quality; so, degree. 

Incorrect orthography. Orthography means “ correct 
writing, or spelling.” “ Incorrect orthography ” is, there¬ 
fore, equivalent to “ incorrect correct writing.” 

How for that. “ I have heard how some critics have 
been pacified with claret and a supper.” 

Directly , for as soon as. “ Directly he came, I went 
away with him.” 

Equally as well , for equally well. E.g., “It will do 
equally as well.” 

Supplement, used as a verb. There is considerable 
authority for this use of the word; but it is a case where 
usage is clearly opposed to the very principles of the 
language. 

Greet and greeting are often improperly used. A greet¬ 
ing is a salutation; to say, therefore, as newspaper re¬ 
porters often do, that a speaker in the Legislature, or on 
the platform, was “greeted with hisses,” or “with groans,” 
is a decided “ malapropism.” 

To a degree is a phrase often used by English writers 
and speakers. E.g., “Mr. Gladstone is sensitive to a de¬ 
gree.” To what degree? 

Farther for further. “Farther” is the comparative of 
far, and should be used in speaking of bodies relatively 
at rest; as, “Jupiter is farther from the earth than 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


457 


Mars.” “ Further ” is the comparative of “forth,” and 
should be used when motion is expressed; as “He ran 
further than you.” 

Quite for very. E.g ., In Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Mem¬ 
ories of Foreign Lands,” we read: “The speeches were 
quite interesting”; “we had quite a sociable time up in 
the gallery ”; and we are told that at Mrs. Cropper’s, “ in 
the evening, quite a circle came in,” etc., etc. The true 
meaning of “ quite ” is completely, entirely. 

Effluvium. The plural of this word is often used as if 
it meant bad odors; whereas an “effluvium” may be a 
stream either of pure air or of foul air,— of pure water 
or of impure, etc. 

None is a contraction of no one, and therefore to say 
“none are,” or “none were,” is just as improper as to say 
“ no one are,” or “no one were.” 

I watched him do it. This is an impropriety of speech 
rarely heard in this country, but often in England. 

Looks beautifully. In spite of the frequency with 
which this impropriety has been censured, one hears it 
almost daily from the lips of educated men and women. 
The error arises from confounding look in the sense of to 
direct the eye, and look in the sense of to seem, to appear. 
In English, many verbs take an adjective with them to 
form the predicate, where in other languages an adverb 
would be used; e.g., “he fell ill”; “he feels cold”; “her 
smiles amid the blushes lovelier show.” No cultivated 
person would say, “she is beautifully,” or “she seems 
beautifully,” yet these phrases are no more improper than 
“she looks beautifully.” We qualify what a person does 
by an adverb; what a person is, or seems to be, by an 
adjective; e.g., “she looks coldly on him”; “she looks cold.” 




458 


words; their use and abuse. 


Leave , as an intransitive verb. E.g., “He left yester¬ 
day.” Many persons who use this phrase are misled by 
what they deem the analogous expression, to write, to read. 
These verbs express an occupation, as truly as to run , to 
walk, to stand. In answer to the question, “ What is A. 
B. doing?” it is sufficient to say, “He is reading.” Here 
a complete idea is conveyed, which is not true of the 
phrase, “ He left yesterday.” 

Myself , for I. E.g., “Mrs. Jones and myself will be 
happy to dine with you”; “Prof. S. and mj^self have 
examined the work.” The proper use of myself is either 
as a reflective pronoun, or for the sake of distinction and 
emphasis; as when Juliet cries, “Romeo, doff thy name, 
and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all 
myself”; or, in Milton’s paradisiacal hymn: “These are 
thy glorious works, Parent of Good, Almighty! Thine this 
universal frame thus wondrous fair! Thyself how won¬ 
drous then! ” 

Restive. This word, which means inclined to rest, obsti¬ 
nate , unwilling to go, is employed, almost constantly, in a 
sense directly the reverse of this; that is, for restless. 

Quantity, for number. E.g., “A quantity of books”; 
“ a quantity of postage stamps.” In speaking of a collec¬ 
tion, or mass, it is proper to use quantity; but in speaking 
of individual objects, however many, we must use the 
word number. “A quantity of meat,” or “ a quantity of 
iron ” is good English, but not “ a quantity of bank-notes.” 
We may say “ a quantity of wood,” but we should say a 
“ number of sticks.” 

Carnival. This word literally means “ Farewell to 
meat,” or, as some etymologists think, “Flesh, be strong!” 
In Catholic countries it signifies a festival celebrated with 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


459 


merriment and revelry during the week before Lent. In 
this country, especially in newspaper use, it is employed 
in the sense of fun, frolic, spree, festival; and that so 
generally as almost to have banished some of these words 
from the language. If many persons are skating,' that is 
a carnival; so, if they take a sleigh-ride, or if there is a 
rush to Long Branch in the summer. As we have a plenty 
of legitimate words to describe these festivities, the use of 
this outlandish term has not a shadow of justification. 

All of them. As of here means out of , corresponding 
with the Latin preposition e, or ex, it cannot be correct to 
say all of them. We may say, “ take one of them ” or 
“ take two of them,” or “take them all”; but the phrase 
we are criticising is wholly unjustifiable. 

To allude. Among the improprieties of speech which 
even those sharp-eyed literary detectives, Alford, Moon, 
and Gould have failed to pounce upon and pillory, are 
the misuses of the word that heads this paragraph. Once the 
verb had a distinct, well defined meaning, but it is now 
rapidly losing its true signification. To allude to a thing,— 
what is it? Is it not to speak of it darkly ,— to hint at it 
playfully (from ludo , ludere ,— to play), without any direct 
mention? Yet the word is used in a sense directly opposite 
to this. Suppose you lose in the street some package, and 
advertise its loss in the newspapers. The person who finds 
the package is sure to reply to your advertisement by 
speaking of “ the package you alluded to in your adver¬ 
tisement,” though you have alluded to nothing, but have 
told your story in the most distinct and straightforward 
manner possible, without an approximation to a hint or 
innuendo. Newspaper reporters, by their abuse of this 
unhappy word, will transform a bold and daring speech in 


460 


words; their use and abuse. 


Congress, in which a senator has taken some bull by the 
horns,— in other words, dealt openly and manfully with 
the subject discussed,— into a heap of dark and mysterious 
innuendoes. The honorable gentleman alluded to the cur¬ 
rency— to the war — to Andrew Johnson — to the New 
Orleans massacre; he alluded to the sympathizers with the 
South, though he denounced them in the most caustic 
terms; he alluded to the tax-bill, and he alluded to fifty 
other things, about every one of which he spoke out his 
mind in emphatic and unequivocal terms. An English 
journal tells a ludicrous story of an M.P. who, his health 
having been drunk by name, rose on his legs, and spoke of 
“ the flattering way in which he had been alluded to.” 
Another public speaker spoke of a book which had been 
alluded to by name. But the climax of absurdity in the 
use of this word was attained by an Irish M.P., who wrote 
a life of an Italian poet. Quoting Byron’s lines about 
“the fatal gift of beauty,” he then goes on to talk about 
“ the fatal gift which has been already alluded to! ” 

Either alternative. E.g., “ You may take either alter¬ 
native.” “ Two alternatives were presented to me.” Alter¬ 
native evidently means a choice,— one choice,— between 
two things. If there be only one offered, we say there is 
no alternative. Two alternatives is, therefore, a palpable 
contradiction in terms; yet some speakers talk of “several 
alternatives ” having been presented to them. 

Whole , for all. The “Spectator” says: “The Red- 
Cross Knight runs through the whole steps of the Christian 
life.” Alison, who is one of the loosest writers in our 
literature, declares, in his “ History of the French Revolu¬ 
tion,” that “the whole Russians are inspired with the 
belief that their mission is to conquer the world.” This 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


461 


can only mean that those Russians who are entire,— who 
have not lost a leg, an arm, or some other part of the body, 
— are inspired with the belief of which he speaks. Whole 
refers to the component parts of a single body, and is there¬ 
fore singular in meaning. 

Jeopardize. There is considerable authority for this 
word, which is beginning to supplant the good old English 
word jeopard. But why is it more needed than perilize , 
hazardize? 

Preventative, for preventive; conversationalist , for con¬ 
vener; underhanded, for underhand; casuality, for casu¬ 
alty; speciality, for specialty; leniency, for lenity; firstly, 
for first; are all base coinages, barbarisms which should 
be excommunicated by “bell, book, and candle.” 

Dangerous, for in danger. A leading Boston paper says 
of a deceased minister: “His illness was only of a week’s 
duration, and was pleurisy and rheumatism. He was not 
supposed to be dangerous.” 

Nice. One of the most offensive barbarisms now preva¬ 
lent is the use of this as a pet word to express almost every 
kind of approbation, and almost every quality. Strictly, 
nice can be used only in a subjective, not in an objective, 
sense; though both of our leading lexicographers approve 
of such expressions as “ a nice bit of cheese.” Of the vul¬ 
garity of such expressions as “a nice man” (meaning a 
good or pleasing man), “a nice day,” “a nice party,” etc., 
there cannot be a shadow of doubt. “ A nice man ” means 
a fastidious man; a “nice letter” is a letter very delicate 
in its language. Some persons are more nice than wise. 
Archdeacon Hare complains that “this characterless dom¬ 
ino,” as he stigmatizes the word nice, is continually used 
by his countrymen, and that “ a universal deluge of niaserie 


462 


words; their use and abuse. 


(for the word was originally niais) threatens to whelm the 
whole island.’’ The Latin word elegans seems to have had 
a similar history; being derived from elego , and meaning 
primarily nice or choice , and subsequently elegant. 

Mutual , for common, or reciprocal. Dean Alford justly 
protests against the stereotyped vulgarism, “a mutual 
friend.” Mutual is applicable to sentiments and acts, but 
not to persons. Two friends may have a mutual love, but 
for either to speak of a third person as being “their mutual 
friend,” is sheer nonsense. Yet Dickens entitled one of his 
novels, “ Our Mutual Friend.” 

Stopping , for staying. “ The Hon. John Jones is stop¬ 
ping at the Sherman House.” In reading such a statement 
as this, we are tempted to ask, When will Mr. Jones stop 
stopping ? A man may stop a dozen times at a place, or on 
a journey, but he cannot continue stopping. One may stop 
at a hotel without becoming a guest. The true meaning of 
the word stop was well understood by the man who did not 
invite his professed friend to visit him: “If you come, at 
any time, within ten miles of my house, just stop.” 

Trifling minutice. Archbishop Whately, in his “ Rhet¬ 
oric,” speaks of “trifling minutiae of style.” In like 
manner, Henry Kirke White speaks of his poems as being 
“ the juvenile efforts of a youth,” and Disraeli, the author 
of “ The Curiosities of Literature,” speaks of “ the battles 
of logomachy,” and of “the mysteries of the arcana of 
alchemy.” The first of these phrases may be less palpably 
tautological than the other three; yet as minutice means 
nearly the same things as trifles , a careful writer would be 
as adverse to using such an expression as Whately’s, as he 
would be to talking, like Sir Archibald Alison, of representa- 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


403 


tive institutions as having been reestablished in our time 
“ by the influence of English Mw^Zomania.” 

Indices, for indexes. “We have examined our indices,” 
etc., say the Chicago abstract-makers. Indices are alge¬ 
braic signs; tables of contents are indexes. 

Rendition, for rendering. E.g., “ Mr. Booth’s rendition 
of Hamlet was admirable.” Rendition means surrender, 
giving up, relinquishing to another; as when we speak of 
the rendition of a beleaguered town to the besieger, or of a 
pledge upon the satisfaction of a debt. 

Extend, for give. Lecture committees, instead of simply 
inviting a public speaker, or giving him an invitation, 
almost universally extend an invitation; perhaps, because 
he is generally at a considerable distance. Richard Grant 
White says pertinently; “As extend (from ex and tendo ) 
means merely to stretch forth, it is much better to say that 
a man put out, offered, or stretched forth his hand than 
that he extended it. Shakespeare makes the pompous, 
pragmatical Malvolio say: ‘ I extend my hand to him 
thus’; but ‘Paul stretched forth the hand, and answered 
for himself.’ This, however, is a question of taste, not of 
correctness.” 

Except, for unless. E.g., “ No one, except he has served 
an apprenticeship, need apply.” The former word, is a 
preposition, and must be followed by a noun or pronoun, 
and not by a proposition. 

Couple, for a pair or brace. When two persons or 
things are joined or linked together, they form a couple. 
The number of things that can be coupled is compara¬ 
tively small, yet the expression is in constant use; as “a 
couple of books,” “a couple of partridges,” “a couple of 


464 


words; their use and abuse. 


weeks,” etc. One might as well speak of “ a pair of 
dollars.” 

Every. E.g ., “ I have every confidence in him “ they 
rendered me every assistance.” Every denotes all the in¬ 
dividuals of a number greater than two, separately consid¬ 
ered. Derived from the Anglo-Saxon, cefer, ever, celc, 
each, it means each of all, not all in mass. By “ every 
confidence” is meant simply perfect confidence; by “every 
assistance,” all possible assistance. 

Almost , as an adjective. Prof. Whitney, in his able 
work on “ Language, and the Study of Language,” speaks 
of “ the almost universality of instruction among us.” 

Condign. E.g., “ He does not deserve the condign pun¬ 
ishment he has received.” As the meaning of condign is 
that which is deserved, we have here a contradiction in 
terms, the statement being equivalent to this: “he does 
not deserve the deserved punishment he has received.” 

Paraphernalia. This is a big, sounding word from the 
Greek, which some newspaper writers are constantly mis¬ 
using. It is strictly a law-term, and means whatever the 
wife brings with her at marriage in addition to her dower. 
Her dress and her ornaments are paraphernalia. To apply 
the term to an Irishman’s sash on St. Patrick’s day, or to a 
Freemason’s hieroglyphic apron, it has been justly said, 
is not only an abuse of language, but a clear invasion of 
woman’s rights. 

Setting-room , for sitting-room, is a gross vulgarism, 
which is quite common, even with those who deem them¬ 
selves nice people. “ I saw your children in the setting- 
room, as I went past,” said a well-dressed woman in our 
hearing, in a horse-car. How could she go past? It is 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


465 


not difficult to go by any object; but to go past is a con¬ 
tradiction in terms. 

An innumerable number is an absurd expression, which 
is used by some persons,— not, it is to be hoped, “ an innu¬ 
merable number ” of times. 

Seraphim, for seraph; the plural for the singular. 
Even Addison says: “The zeal of the seraphim breaks 
forth,” etc. This is as ludicrous as the language of the 
Indiana justice, who spoke of “ the first claw of the stat¬ 
ute,” or the answer of the man who, when asked whether 
he had no politics, replied, “ Not a single politic.” 

People , for persons, “ Many people think so.” Better, 
persons; people means a body of persons regarded col¬ 
lectively, a nation. 

Off of, for off. “ Cut a yard off of the cloth.” 

More perfect, most perfect. What shall be said of these 
and similar forms of expression? Doubtless they should 
be discouraged, though used by Shakespeare and Milton. 
It may be argued in their favor, that, though not logically 
correct, yet they are rhetorically so. It is true that, as 
“ twenty lions cannot be more twenty than twenty flies,” 
so nothing can be more perfect than perfection. But we 
do not object to say that one man is braver than another, 
or wiser, though, if we had an absolute standard of 
bravery or wisdom,— that is, a clear idea of them,— we 
should pronounce either of the two persons to be simply 
brave or not brave, wise or not wise. We say that Smith 
is a better man than Jones, though no one is absolutely 
good but God. These forms are used because language is 
inadequate to express the intensity of the thought,— as in 
Milton’s “ most wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best,” or 
the lines, 


466 


words; their use and abuse. 


“ And in the lowest deep a lower deep , 

Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, 

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” 

Milton abounds in these illogical expressions, as do the 
best Greek poets; and one of the happiest verses in the 
poems of W. W. Story is a similar intentional contradic¬ 
tion, as 

“Of every noble work the silent part is best; 

Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed.” 

Ugly, for ill-tempered. A leading New York divine is 
reported as saying of an ill-tempered child, that “ he wants 
all he sees, and screams if he does not get it; ugly as he 
can be, no matter who is disturbed by it.” 

Is, for are. One of the most frequent blemishes in 
English prose is the indiscriminate use of singulars and 
plurals. E.g ., Junius writes: “Both minister and mag¬ 
istrate is compelled to choose between his duty and his 
reputation.” Even Lindley Murray writes: “ Their gen¬ 
eral scope and tendency is not remembered at all”; and 
Milton sings: 

“For their mind and spirit remains invincible.” 

Some grammarians defend these forms of expression on 
the ground that when two or more nouns singular repre¬ 
sent a single idea, the verb to which they are the nomina¬ 
tive may be put in the singular. The answer to this is, 
that if the nouns express the same idea, one of them is 
superfluous; if different ideas, then they form a plural, 
and the verb should be plural also. Another quibble 
employed to justify such expressions, is that the verb, 
which is expressed after the last noun, is considered as 
understood after the first. But we are not told how this 
process of subaudition can go on in the mind of the reader, 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


467 


before he*knows what the verb is to be; and while ellipsis 
not only is in many cases permissible, but gives concise¬ 
ness and energy to style, yet there is a limit beyond which 
it cannot be pushed without leading to literary anarchy. 

Caption , for heading. E.g., “ The caption of this news¬ 
paper article.” Caption means that part of a legal instru¬ 
ment which shows where, when, and by what authority it 
was taken, found, or executed. 

To extremely maltreat. This phrase from Trench is an 
example of a very common solecism. 7b, the sign of the 
infinitive, should never be separated from the verb. Say 
“ to maltreat extremely,” or “ extremely to maltreat.” 

Accord , for grant. “ He accorded them (or to them) 
all they asked for.” To accord with means properly to 
agree or to suit; as, “ He accorded with my views.” 

Enthuse, a word used by some clergymen, is not to be 
found either in Worcester’s Dictionary or in Webster’s 
“ Unabridged.” 

Personalty. This word is supposed by some persons 
to mean articles worn on one’s person. Some years ago, 
a lady, in England, who had made this mistake, and who 
wished to leave to her servant her clothing, jewels, etc., 
described them as her personalty , and unwittingly included 
in her bequest ten thousand pounds. 

Do. This verb is often used incorrectly as a substitute 
for other verbs; as, “I did not say, as some have done.” 
We may properly say, “I did not say, as some do” (say), 
for here the ellipsis of the preceding verb may be supplied. 

On to, for on, or upon. “He got on to an omnibus;” 
“ He jumped on to a chair.” The preposition to is super¬ 
fluous. Say, “ He got upon an omnibus,” etc. Some per- 


468 


words; their use and abuse. 


sons speak of “continuing on,” which is as objectionable 
as “ He went to Boston for to see the city.” 

Older , for elder. Older is properly applied to objects, 
animate and inanimate; elder, to rational beings. 

Overfloivn, for overflowed. “ The river has overflown.” 
Flowed is the participle of “ to flow ”; flown, of “ to fly.” 

Spoonsful , for spoonfuls, and effluvia for effluvium, are 
very common errors. “ A disagreeable effluvia ” is as gross 
a mistake as “ an inexplicable phenomena.” 

Scarcely, for hardly. Scarcely pertains to quantity; 
hardly, to degree; as, “There is scarcely a bushel”; “I 
shall hardly finish my job by night-fall.” 

Fare thee well, which has Byron’s authority, is plainly 
wrong. 

Community , for the community; as “Community will 
not submit to such outrages.” Prof. Marsh has justly 
censured this vulgarism. Who would think of saying, 
“Public is interested in this question”? When we per¬ 
sonify common nouns used definitely in the singular num¬ 
ber, we may omit the article, as when we speak of the 
doings of Parliament, or of Holy Church. “During the 
Revolution,” says Professor M., “ while the federal gov¬ 
ernment was a body of doubtful authority and perma¬ 
nence, . . . the phrase used was always ‘ the Congress,’ 
and such is the form of expression in the Constitution 
itself. But when the Government became consolidated, 
and Congress was recognized as the paramount legislative 
power of the Union, ... it was personified, and the arti¬ 
cle dropped, and, in like manner, the word Government 
is often used in the same way.” 

Folks for folk. As folk implies plurality, the s is 
needless. 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


469 


Mussulmen. Mussulman is not a compound of man, and, 
therefore, like German, it forms its plural by adding s. 

Drive, for ride. A lady says that “ she is going to drive 
in the park,” when she intends that her servant shall drive 
(not her, but) the horses. 

Try and, for try to. E.g., “ Try and do it.” 

Whole, entire, complete, and total, are words which are 
used almost indiscriminately by many persons. That is 
whole, from which nothing has been taken; that is entire, 
which has not been divided; that is complete, which has all 
its parts. Total refers to the aggregate of the parts. 
Thus .we say, a whole loaf of bread; an entire set of 
spoons; a complete harness; the total cost or expense. 

Succeed, for give success to, or cause to succeed. E.g., 
“ If Providence succeed us in this work.” Both Webster 
and Worcester justify this use of succeed as a transitive 
verb; but if not now grammatically objectionable, as 
formerly, it is still to be avoided on the ground of am¬ 
biguity. In the phrase quoted, succeed may mean either 
cause to succeed, or follow. 

Tartar should be, strictly, Tatar. When the Tatar 
hordes, in the thirteenth century, burst forth from the 
Asiatic steppes, this fearful invasion was thought to be a 
fulfilment of the prediction of the opening of the bottom¬ 
less pit, as portrayed in the ninth chapter of Revelations. 
To bring the name into relation with Tartarus, Tatar was 
written, as it still continues to be written, Tartar. 

The following is an example of a very common error in 
the arrangement of words: 

“Dead in sins and in transgressions 
Jesus cast his eyes on me, . 

And of his divine possessions 
Bade me then a sharer be;” etc. 


470 


words: their use and abuse. 


Though such is not the writer’s intention, he really 
speaks of Jesus as being “ dead in sins and in transgres¬ 
sions”; for the syntax of the verse admits of no other 
meaning. 

Numerous , for many. To speak of “ our numerous 
friends ” is to say that each friend is numerous. 

That of; as, “ He chose for a profession that of the 
law.” This is equivalent to saying: He chose for a pro¬ 
fession the profession of law; or, he chose a profession for 
a profession. Why not say, “ He chose law for a profes¬ 
sion ”? 

Fellow countrymen. What is the difference between 
“countrymen” and “fellow countrymen?” 

Distinguish, for discriminate. To distinguish is to 
mark broad and plain differences; to discriminate is to 
notice minute and subtle shades of difference. 

Transpire , for to happen. “ Transpire ” meant origi¬ 
nally to emit insensible vapor through the pores of the 
skin. Afterward it was used metaphorically in the sense 
of to become known, to pass from secrecy into publicity. 
But to say that a certain event “ transpired yesterday,” 
meaning that it occurred then, is a gross vulgarism. 

Ventilate , for discuss. 

Hung , for hanged. “ Hang,” when it means to take 
away life by public execution, is a regular verb. 

Bid, for bade. E.g., The London “Times” says: “He 
called his servants, and bid them procure fire-arms.” 

Dare, for durst. “ Neither her maidens nor the priest 
dare speak to her for half an hour,” says the Rev. 
Charles Kingsley, in one of his novels. 

In, for within. E.g., “Is Mr. Smith in?” 

Notwithstanding, for although. E.g., “ Notwithstanding 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


471 


they fought bravely, they were defeated.” “ Notwithstand¬ 
ing” is a preposition, and cannot be correctly used as a 
conjunction. 

Two good ones. “ Among all the apples there were but 
two good ones.” Two ones? 

Raising the rent , for increasing the rent. A landlord 
notified his tenant that he should raise his rent. “ Thank 
you,” was the reply; “I find it very hard to raise it my¬ 
self.” 

Was , for is. “Two young men,” says Swift, “have 
made a discovery, that there was a God.” That there ivas 
a God? When? This year, or last year, or ages ago? 
All general truths should be expressed by the use of verbs 
in the present tense. 

Shall and will. There are, perhaps, no two words in 
the language which are more frequently confounded or 
used inaccurately, than shall and will. Certain it is, that 
of all the rocks on which foreigners split in the use of the 
Queen’s English, there is none which so puzzles and per¬ 
plexes them as the distinction between these little words. 
Originally both words were employed for the same purpose 
in other languages of the same stock with ours; but their 
use has been worked out by the descendants of the Anglo- 
Saxons, until it has attained a degree of nicety remarkable 
in itself, and by no means easy of acquisition even by the 
subjects of Victoria or by Americans. Every one has heard 
of the Dutchman who, on falling into a river, cried out, 
“I will drown, and nobody shall help me.” The Irish are 
perpetually using shall for will, while the Scotch use of 
will for shall is equally inveterate and universal. Dr. 
Chalmers says: “I am not able to devote as much time 
and attention to other subjects as I will be under the neces- 


m 


words; their use and abuse. 


sity of doing next winter.” The use of shall for will, in 
the following passage, has led some critics strongly to sus¬ 
pect that the author of the anonymous work, “ Vestiges 
of Creation,” is a Scotchman: “I do not expect that any 
word of praise which this work may elicit shall ever be 
responded to by me; or that any word of censure shall 
ever be parried or deprecated.” This awkward use of 
shall , we have seen, is not a Scotticism; yet it is curious 
to see how a writer who pertinaciously shrouds himself in 
mystery, may be detected by the blundering use of a mon¬ 
osyllable. So the use of the possessive neuter pronoun 
its in the poems which Chatterton wrote and palmed off 
as the productions of one Rowlie, a monk in the fifteenth 
century, betrayed the forgery,— inasmuch as that little 
monosyllable, its , now so common and convenient, did not 
find its way into the language till about the time of Shake¬ 
speare. Milton never once uses it, nor, except as a mis¬ 
print, is it to be found anywhere in the Bible. 

Gilfillan, a Scotch writer, thus uses will for shall: “If 
we look within the rough and awkward outside, we will 
be richly rewarded by its perusal.” So Alison, the his¬ 
torian: “We know to what causes our past reverses have 
been owing, and we will have ourselves to blame if they 
are again incurred.” Macaulay observes that “ not one 
Londoner in a thousand ever misplaces his will and shall. 
Doctor Robinson could, undoubtedly, have written a lumi¬ 
nous dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in 
his latest work, he sometimes misplaced them ludicrously.” 
But Doctor Johnson was a Londoner, and he did not always 
use his slialls and wills correctly, as will be seen by the 
following extract from a letter to Boswell in 1774: “You 
must make haste and gather me all you can, and do it 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


473 


quickly, or I will and shall do without it.” In this anti¬ 
climax Johnson meant to emphasize the latter of the aux¬ 
iliaries. But shall (Saxon, sceal=necesse est) in the first 
person, simply foretells; as, “I shall go to New York to¬ 
morrow.” On the other hand, will, in the first person, 
not only foretells, but promises, or declares the resolution 
to do a thing; as, “I will pay you what I owe you.” The 
Doctor should have said: “I shall and will do without it,” 
putting the strongest term last. The confusion of the 
two words is steadily increasing in this country. For¬ 
merly the only Americans who confounded them were 
Southerners; now, the misuse of the word is stealing 
through the North. E.g ., “I will go to town to-morrow, 
and shall take an early opportunity of calling on your 
friend there.” “We will never look on his like again.” 
A writer in a New York paper says: “None of our coal 
mines are deep, but the time is coming when we will have 
to dig deeper in search of both coal and metallic ores.” 
Again, we hear persons speak thus: “Let us keep a sharp 
lookout, and we will avoid all danger.” 

Shakespeare rarely confounded the two words; for ex¬ 
ample, in “Coriolanus”: 

“ Cor. Shall remain! 

Hear you this Triton of the minnows? mark you 
His absolute shall?" 

Again, in Antony and Cleopatra: 

“ Meno. Wilt thou be lord of the whole world? 

Senator. He shall to the market-place.” 

Wordsworth, too, who is one of the most accurate 
writers in our literature, nicely discriminates in his use 
of shall and will: 


474 


words; their use and abuse. 


“This child I to myself will take; 

She shall be mine, and I will make 
A lady of my own. 

The stars of midnight shall be dear 

To her; and she shall lean her ear 

In many a secret place 

Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 

And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face.” 

In the last passage determination is expressed, and there¬ 
fore shall is properly used. 

When the Bible was translated, the language was in 
a state of transition; hence we read in Kings ii: “Ahab 
shall slay me,” for will. In Genesis xliii, 3-5, the two 
words are nicely discriminated. The distinction between 
them, strange to say, is entirely ignored in the Revised 
Version; as e.g., Peter is told, “Thou shalt deny me 
thrice”; and we read: “One of you shall betray me,” 
where futurity only is expressed in the Greek. 

According to Grimm, “shall” is derived from skalan , 
the Scandinavian word for the pain of death, which is also 
the source of our word “kill.” The predominant idea in 
“shall” is that of doom. When choosing a term to ex¬ 
press the inevitable future, the founders of our lan¬ 
guage chose a term the most expressive possible of 
a fatal, inevitable future. As “shall” contains the 
idea of doom, “will” conveys the idea of choice. The 
general rule to be followed in the use of the two words 
is, that when the simple idea of future occurrence is to 
be expressed, unconnected with the speaker’s resolve, we 
must use shall in the first person, and will in the second 
and third; as, “I shall die, you will die, he will die”; but 
when the idea of compulsion or necessity is to be conveyed, 
—a futurity connected with the will of the speaker,— will 
must be employed in the first person, and shall in the 


COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH. 


475 


second and third; as, “ I will go, you shall go, he shall go.” 
“ I shall attain to thirty at my next birthday ” merely 
foretells the age to which the speaker will have reached 
at his next birthday; “I will attain to thirty at my next 
birthday” would imply a determination to be so old at 
the time mentioned. “You shall have some money to¬ 
morrow” would imply a promise to pay it; “you will 
have some money to-morrow ” would only imply an 
expectation that the person addressed would receive some 
money. _ ,, 

Similar to the misuse^f shall and will, is that of would 
for should; as, “You promised that it would be done;” 
“ But for reinforcement we would have been beaten.” 
Mr. Brace, in his work on Hungary, makes the people of 
that country say of Kossuth: “He ought to have known 
that we would be ruined,”— which can only mean “ we 
wished to be ruined.” 

The importance of attending to the distinction of shall 
and will , and to the nice distinctions of words generally, 
is strikingly illustrated by an incident in Massachusetts. 
In 1844, Abner Rogers was tried in that state for the 
murder of the warden of the penitentiary. The man who 
had been sent to search the prisoner, said in evidence: 
“ He (Rogers) said, ‘ I have fixed the warden, and I’ll have 
a rope round my neck.’ On the strength of what he said, 
I took his suspenders from him.” Being cross-examined, 
the witness said his words were: “I will have a rope,” 
not “ I shall have a rope.” The counsel against the pris¬ 
oner argued that he declared an intention of suicide, to 
escape from the penalty of the law, which he knew he had 
incurred. On the other hand, shall would, no doubt, have 
been regarded as a betrayal of his consciousness of having 


476 


words; their use and abuse. 


incurred a felon’s doom. The prisoner was acquitted on 
the ground of insanity. Strange that the fate of an 
alleged murderer should turn upon the question which 
he used of two little words that are so frequently con¬ 
founded, and employed one for the other! It would be 
difficult to conceive of a more pregnant comment on 
the importance of using words with discrimination and 
accuracy. 

It would be impossible, in the limits to which we are 
restricted, to give all the nice distinctions to be observed in 
the use of shall and will. For a full explanation of the 
subject we must refer the unlearned reader to the various 
English grammars, and such works as Sir E. W. Head’s 
treatise on the two words, and the works on Synonyms 
by Graham, Crabb, and Whately. Prof. Scheie DeVere, 
in his late “ Studies in Language,” expresses the opinion 
that this double future is a great beauty of the English 
language, but that it is impossible to give any rule for its 
use, which will cover all cases, and that the only sure 
guide is “ that instinct which is given to all who learn a 
language with their mother’s milk, or who acquire it so 
successfully as to master its spirit as well as its form.” 
His use of will for shall , in this very work, verifies the 
latter part of this statement, and shows that a foreigner 
may have a profound knowledge of the genius and con¬ 
stitution of a language, and yet be sorely puzzled by its 
niceties and subtleties. “ If we go back,” he says, “ for 
the purpose of thus tracing the history of nouns to the 
oldest forms of English, we will there find the method 
of forming them from the first and simplest elements” 
(page 140). The “Edinburgh Review” denounces the 
distinction of shall and will, by their neglect of which the 


COMMON IMPKOPKIETIES OF SPEECH. 


477 


Scotch are so often bewrayed, as one of the most capricious 
and inconsistent of all imaginable irregularities, and as at 
variance not less with original etymology than with former 
usage. Prof. Marsh regards it as a verbal quibble, which 
will soon disappear from our language. It is a quibble 
just as any distinction is a quibble to persons who are too 
dull, too lazy, or too careless to apprehend it. With as 
much propriety might the distinction between the indica¬ 
tive and subjunctive forms of the verb, or the distinction 
between farther and further, strong and robust, empty and 
vacant , be pronounced a verbal quibble. Sir Edmund W. 
Head has shown that the difference is not one which has 
an existence only in the pedagogue’s brain, but that it is as 
real and legitimate as that between be and am, and dates 
back as far as Wicliffe and Chaucer, while it has also the 
authority of Shakespeare. 

We conclude this chapter with the following lines by 
an English poet: 

“ Beyond the vague Atlantic deep. 

Far as the farthest prairies sweep, 

Where forest glooms the nerves appall, 

Where burns the radiant western fall, 

One duty lies on old and young,— 

With filial piety to guard, 

As on its greenest native sward, 

The glory of the English tongue. 

That ample speech! That subtle speech 1 
Apt for the need of all and each: 

Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend 
Wherever human feelings tend. 

Preserve its force,—conserve its powers; 

And through the maze of civic life, 

In letters, commerce, even in strife, 

Forget not it is yours and ours.” 

































* 


































*• 







PRINCIPAL BOOKS CONSULTED. 


Joseph Angus. Hand-Book of the English Tongue. London. 
18G3. 

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by John Gillies. London, 1823. 
Samuel Bailey. Discourses on Various Subjects. London, 1862. 
W. L. Blackley. Word-Gossip. London, 18G9. 

Francis Bowen. Treatise on Logic. Boston, 1874. 

Breen. Modern English Literature. London. 

John Earle. Philology of the English Tongue. Oxford, 1871. 
William C. Fowler. The English Language in its Elements and 
Forms. New York, 1860. 

F. W. Farrar. The Origin of Language. London, 1860. 

“ Chapters on Language. London, 1873. 

“ Families of Speech. London, 1873. 

I. Plant Fleming. Analysis of the English Language. London, 
1869. 

G. F. Graham. A Book about Words. London, 1869. 

Richard Garnett. Philological Essays. London, 1859. 
Matthew Harrison. The Rise , Progress , and Present Structure 

of the English Language. London, 1848. 
Edward N. Hoare. Exotics, or English Words Derived from Latin 
Roots. London, 1863. 

Edmund W. Head. “Shall” and “Will.” London, 1858. 

R. G. Latham. The English Language. London, 1873. 

George C. Lewis. Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Politi¬ 
cal Terms. Oxford, 1877. 

Mark A. Lower. An Essay on Family Nomenclature. (Two Vol¬ 
umes.) London, 1875. 

George P. Marsh. Lectures on the English Language. New York, 
1860. 

“ The Origin and History of the English Lan¬ 

guage. New York, 1862. 

479 



480 


PRINCIPAL BOOKS CONSULTED. 


J. S. Mill. A System of Logic. New York, 1869. 

Max Muller. Lectures on the Science of Language. (First and 
Second Series.) New York, 1865. 

J. H. Newman. The Ldea of a University. London, 1873. 

Notes and Queries. London, 1852. 

Ernest Renan. De VOrigine du Langage. Paris, 1864. 

W. T. Shedd. Homiletics and Pastoral Theology. New York, 1867. 
Archdeacon Smith. Common Words with Curious Derivations. 
London, 1865. 

John Stoddard. The Philosophy of Language. London, 1854. 
William Thomson. Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought. 
London, 1857. 

John Horne Tooke. The Diversions of Purley. London, 1860. 
Richard Chenevix Trench. On the Study of Words. London, 
1869. 

“ English , Past and Present. 6th ed. London, 1868. 

“ Select Glossary of English Words. 3d ed. London, 1865. 

Richard Whately. Elements of Logic. New York, 1865. 

“ Elements of Rhetoric. New York, 1866. 

Hensleigh Wedgwood. Etymological Dictionary. London, 1872. 
W. D. Whitney. Language and the Study of Language. New 
York, 1867. 

“ The Life and Growth of Language. New York, 

1875. 

E. P. Whipple. Essays and Reviews. Boston, 1856. 

“ Literature and Life. Boston, 1871. 

Essays by a Barrister. London, 1862. 


INDEX. 


A. 

abdicate and desert, 282. 
abominable, 392. 
accord, 467. 

a confirmed invalid, 455. 
Addington, nicknamed by Sheri¬ 
dan, 361. 

Adullamites, 362. 
agriculturalist, 445. 
alert, 395. 

Alexander, Addison, D.D., his 
lines on small words, 157. 
alligator, 387. 
all of them, 459. 
all right, 72. 
almost, 464. 
alms, 419. 
alone, 448. 

American orators, their diffuse¬ 
ness, 179-181; their exaggera¬ 
tion, 185. 

Americans, spendthrifts of lan¬ 
guage, 179; their exaggeration, 
184, 187. 

Amphibolous sentences, 291. 
and, 285. 
anecdote, 378. 

Animals, cannot generalize, or 
designate things by signs, 1-2. 
an innumerable number, 465. 
animosity, 384. 
antecedents, 430. 
anyhow, 446. 
apology, 271. 
apple-pie order, 402. 
appreciates, 455. 

Aristotle, on frigidity of style, 
117. 

Armstrong, 338. 

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, on the 
styles of historians, 65, 66. 
artesian, 408. 
artillery, 379. 
assassin, 396. 


astonish, 376. 
atom, 320. 
at all, 449. 
atte, at, 331. 
attraction, 84. 
avocation, 448. 

B. 

Bacon, Lord, his command of 
language, 10; on the power of 
words, 84, 85. 

Bailey, Samuel, on Berkeley’s 
theory of vision, 16. 
balance, 116, 448. 

Balzac, on the witchery of words, 
85. 

banister, 437. 
bankrupt, 387. 

Barrow, Isaac, D.D., his ‘word- 
coinings, 433. 
bedlam, 418. 
belfry, 416. 

Bentley, Richard, D.D., 236, 241. 
berg, 32. 
bib, 404. 
bid, 470. 
bishop, 415. 
bit, 387. 

bitter end, the, 403. 
blackguards, 378. 
blanket, 409. 
blue-stocking, 390. 
blunderbuss, 397. 

Boileau, quoted, 111, 214. 
Bolingbroke, Lord, his attention 
to his style, 441. 
bombast, 379. 
bonhomme, 71. 
booby, 396. 
bosh, 397. 

Botany, its nomenclature, 89. 
boudoir, 400. 
bound, 455. 

Bowen, Prof. Francis, on a fallacy 
481 




482 


INDEX. 


of Darwin’s, 277; on second 
causes, 270. 
bran-new, 414. 
brat, 383. 
bravery, 377. 

Brown, John, his moderation of 
language, 191. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, on scholars, 

6 . 

Buckle, on the dialect of English 
scholars, 241. 
buffoon, 389. 

Bulwer, Lytton, on the power of 
words, 93; on children’s names, 
324. 

bumper, 394. 

Bunsen, on poetry, 248. 

Burr, Aaron, saying of, 182. 
but, 445. 
but that, 449. 
by-laws, 395. 

Byron, Lord, on Keats’s death, 
90; his denunciation of the 
English Language, 133, 134; 
his use of monosyllables, 152, 
153; his subscription for Greece, 
160; on the inadequacy of lan¬ 
guage, 212. 

C. 

Caesar, 335. 
caitiff, 379. 
caloric, 293. 
canard, 391. 

Canning, George, his command 
of words, 18; extract from, 200. 
canon, cannon, 396. 

Cant, political, 168; ethical, 169; 
Seneca’s, 169; religious, 170- 
173; Spurgeon on, 172; in art, 
176; etymology of the word, 
389, 390. 
caption, 467. 

Capuchin, 355. 
carat, 405. 

Carbo, anecdote of, 29. 

Carlyle, Thomas, satirized by an 
auctioneer, 120. 
carnival, 458. 
caucus, 401. 
causeway, 419. 


ceiling, 417. 
celebrity, 451. 
chaffer, 385. 
chagrin, 396. 

Chalmers, Thomas, D.D., on John 
Foster, 27; his dispute with 
Stuart, 264. 

Charles V, saying of, 177. 
Chatham, Lord, his study of 
words, 17; his words, 52, 53; 
his speeches, 182. 
cheat, 398. 

Chesterfield, Lord, anecdote of, 
128; his efforts to improve his 
language, 440. 
chevalier d'industrie, 95. 

Choate, Rufus, on the diction 
suitable to lawyers, 18; his 
prodigality of words, 187. 
Christian, 356, 357. 

Cicero, his choice of words, 29; 

his word-coining, 105. 
civilization, 274. 

Clarendon, Lord, his solecisms, 
438. 

cleave, 421. 

Climate, its effects on language, 
243, 244. 

Cobbett, William, his mastery of 
narration and invective, 236; 
his nicknames of Peel, Stanley, 
and others, 352. 
cock, 244. 

Coke, Sir Edward, his character¬ 
ization of Raleigh, 53. 
Coleridge, Hartley N., his char¬ 
acterization of the Greek and 
Latin languages, 74; his lines 
on speech, 193. 

Coleridge, S. T., on Shakespeare’s 
language, 7; his witchery of 
phrase, 9; on the study of the 
Bible, 115; on religious cant, 
171; his word-coinings, 432, 
433; on Youth and Age, 256. 
Collins, William, lines from, 152. 
Combe, Dr. Andrew, on Cowper’s 
and Wilberforce’s letters, 165. 
commerce, 114. 

Common Improprieties of Speech, 
424-477. 




INDEX. 


483 


community. 468. 
compulsory, 275. 
concede, 381. 
condign, 464. 
conduct, 454. 
constable, 404. 
convene, 440. 

Conversation, religious defined, 
172. 

convivium, 75. 

Cooper, Sir Astley, anecdote of, 
72. 

coquet, 380. 
corporeal, 446. 
corpse, 380. 

Corwin, Thomas, Gov., 132. 
Council of Basle, 263. 
country-dance, 415. 
couple, 463. 

Courier, P. L., on abusive epi¬ 
thets, 279. 
court, 405, 406. 

Couthon, 168. 

Cowper, William, his translation 
of Homer, 36; his poetry, 165; 
his letters, 165. 
craft, 383. 

Craik, Prof., on the revivifica¬ 
tion of human speech, 57. 
crawfish, 416. 
creative, 290, 291. 

Crockett, David, anecdote of, 15. 
Crowe, W., lines from, 252. 
crushed out, 449. 
cunning, 384. 
cur, 405. 

Curiosities of Language, 367-423. 
curmudgeon, 397. 

Curran, his encounter with a fish- 
woman, 365. 

Currer Bell, her “Villette” crit¬ 
icised, 126. 

Cuvier, anecdote of, 15. 

D. 

dandelion, 415. 
dangerous, 461. 

Dante, his language, 9. 
dare, 470. 

Darwin, Charles, his fallacious 
use of '‘tend,” 277. 


deceiving, 452. 
decimated, 115. 
deduction, 445. 
defalcation, 385. 
delinquents, 347. 

De Maistre, Count Joseph, on 
Locke, 276; on Pagan ideas of 
holiness and sin, 81. 

De Medicis, Catherine, sayings of, 
178. 

Demosthenes, his choice of words, 
28, 29; his speeches, 181,182; his 
ignorance of foreign tongues, 
and study of Thucydides, 239. 
demure, 383. 

De Quincey, his mastery of words, 
12; on translation, 32; on the 
word “humbug,” 81, 82; on 
Cardinal Mezzofanti, 178; on 
the French language of pas¬ 
sion, 189; on the choice of Sax¬ 
on or Romanic words, 195, 196, 
201; on the inadequacy of lan¬ 
guage, 212; on the style of 
women’s letters, 240, 241; say¬ 
ing of, 319; on improprieties 
of speech, 439. 

Denmark, capture of her fleet by 
the British, 304, 305. 
Desbrosses, on Roman hereditary 
names, 327. 
dexterity, 388. 

“ Dick Swiveller style,” 164. 
differ with, different to, 446. 
directly, 456. 

Disraeii, Benjamin, quoted, 263. 
distinguish, 470. 
do, 467. 

doing good, 307-309. 
dollar, 404. 

Domenech, the Abbe, on the lan¬ 
guage of savages, 24, 25. 
Dominicans, 355. 
don’t, 451. 
dormouse, 416. 

“Double Procession,” the, contro¬ 
versy concerning it, 262. 
doubt, 447. 
drive, 469. 

Dryden, John, his scientific lan¬ 
guage, 10; his translation of 



484 


INDEX. 


the “iEneid,” 36; his version 
of “ Paradise Lost,” 37, 38; his 
modernization of Chaucer, 37; 
lines from, 251; Willmott on 
his versification, 253. 
dun, 408, 431. 
dunce, 386, 387. 

Du Ponceau, on the inadequacy 
of language, 212. 

Dver, lines from his “ Ruins of 
Rome,” 249. 

E. 

Easter, 406. 
education, 280-282. 
effluvium, 457. 
egregious, 401. 
either, 452, 453. 
either alternative, 460. 
electricity, 293. 

Eloquence, uses simple language, 
124, 125. 

Emerson, R. W., on Montaigne’s 
words, 10; on Shakespeare’s 
suggestiveness, 55; on oratory, 
123. 

English Bible, richness of its vo¬ 
cabulary, 204; F. W. Faber 
on, 204. 

English Language, few of its 
words in common use, 51, 58; 
its copiousness, 132-138; de¬ 
cried by Charles V, Madame de 
Stael and Byron, 133; Addison 
and Waller on, 134; its compos¬ 
ite character, 135, 136; its ir¬ 
regularities, 137; illustrations 
of its monosyllabic character, 
147-157; its capabilities, 214, 
215. 

English Literature, its looseness 
of diction, 425. 

English race, its intolerance of 
restraints, 425. 

Ennius, saying of, 177. 
enthuse, 467. 
equally as well, 456. 
equanimity of mind, 451. 

Erskine, Lord, his mastery of 
English, 236. 
ether, 293, 


Etymological knowledge, its value 
in the use of words, 231-234. 
Etymology, rules of, 413; errors 
based on, 285-289. 

Euripides, on character, 54. 
every, 464. 
evidence, 449. 

Exaggeration of language, 184- 
193; F. W. Robinson on, 191. 
except, 463. 
excessively, 452. 
exchequer, 406. 
exorbitant, 381. 
experience, 266, 267. 

Expletives, 90, 91. 
extend, 463. 

F. 

faint, 388. 

Fallacies in W ords, 257-322. 

farce, 392. 

farther, 456. 

fast, 420. 

fatherland, 429. 

Federalist, 347. 
fellow, 386. 

fellow countrymen, 470. 

female, 114. 

final completion, 450. 

Fitz, witz, and sky, 329. 
folks, 468. 

Fortescue, 337. 

Foster, John, on the words of a 
man of genius, 6; on eloquence, 
122 . 

Fox, C. J., on Pitt’s words, 26; 

his eloquence, 52. 

Frank, 407. 

Franklin, Dr. Benjamin, his style, 
236. 

Freeman, Dr. E. A., on the Eng¬ 
lish Language, 118. 
freemason, 415. 

French Academy, the, 431. 
French language, its lack of words 
for “bribe,” “sober,” “listen¬ 
er,” “home,” etc., 70-72. 
French Literature, its method 
and lucidity, 426. 

Frenchmen, their distaste for for¬ 
eign words, 126, 127, 



INDEX. 


485 


from thence, from whence, 454. 
Frondeurs , 850. 
frontispiece, 414. 

Fuller, Dr. Thomas, on the Ital¬ 
ian and Swiss languages, 76; 
on high-flown language, 129; 
on “ah!’’and “ha!” 143; on 
the schoolmen, 317; his ety¬ 
mologies, 414; his story of 
John Cuts, 339. 
fur, 95. 

G. 

Garrick, David, saying of, 146. 
Gautier, Theophile, his study of 
words, 19. 
gene, 71. 

gentleman, 97-99. 

George I, of England, 166. 
Gesticulation, its expressiveness, 
19-21. 

gibberish, 394, 408. 

Gibbon, Edward, his historical 
insinuations and suppressions, 
292. 

girl, 378. 
go ahead, 72. 

Goethe, saying of, 34; lines from, 
215; on study of foreign 
tongues, 229: a poor linguist, 
238. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, his solecisms, 
438, 439. 
gooseberry, 414. 
gossip, 385. 

Gothic, 84. 

Greek and Latin, contrasted, 74; 
a knowledge of them not neces¬ 
sary to the command of Eng¬ 
lish, 229-241; their value for 
culture, 230, 231. 

Greek, its subtle distinctions, 
34. 

Greek words, Roman affectation 
for, 127. 

Greeks, their perversions of words, 
96; their ignorance of grammar 
and etymology, 238. 
greet, greeting, 456. 

Gregory VII, Pope, 167. 

Guelphs and Ghibellines, 358. 


gutted, 430. 
gypsies, 418. 

H. 

haberdasher, 397. 
hack, 405. 
had have, 435, 450. 
had ought, 450. 

Halifax, Lord, on trimming, 359. 
Hall, Robert, D.D., anecdotes of, 
26, 173; on his aping of John¬ 
son, 281; on Saxon-English, 
205. 

Ilalleck, Fitz-Greene, his anec¬ 
dote of a Scotch girl, 129. 
Hamilton, Alexander, his legal 
arguments, 182. 

Hamilton, “ Single Speech,” 360. 
Hamilton, Sir William,on certain 
philosophical terms, 285. 
Handel, saying of, 133. 
handkerchief, 404. 
harden, 301, 302. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, on the 
spells in words, 47. 
hawk, 398. 

Haydon, anecdote of, 85. 

Hazlitt, William, on words, 4; 

his “ Tiddydoll ” story, 364. 
helter-skelter, 388. 

Herder, his nickname of Goethe, 
348. 

hermetically, 409. 

Higginson, T. W., on words, 4, 
46. 

hip, hip, hurrah! 388. 

Historians, their characters shown 
by their styles, 65. 
hoax, 397. 

Hobbes, his language, 316; on 
words, 316, 317. 
hocus pocus, 396. 

Ilollinshed, his “ Chronicles ” 
quoted, 286. 

Homer, his “ winged words,” 5; 

his onomatopoeia, 254. 

“ Homoousians ” and “Homoiu- 
sians,” 262. 
homo, 320. 
honnetefe, 71. 

Horne Tooke, saying of, 155, 




486 


INDEX. 


horrent, 375. 
hospital, 313. 
host, 405. 
how, 456. 

Huguenot, 393, 394. 
humble-pie, 398. 
humbug, 82, 395. 

Hume, David, 98, 99; his argu¬ 
ment against miracles, 265-270; 
his history of England, 292; on 
the term “delinquents,” 347. 
humility, 81. 
hung, 470. 
hypocrite, 402. 

I. 

idiot, 383. 

I have got, 445. 
imagination, 234. 
imbecile, 396. 
imbroglio, 115. 

Imitation, in literature, 218, 222. 

imp, 383. 
impertinent, 271. 
in, 470. 

inaugurate, 114. 
incomprehensible, 272. 
incorrect orthography, 456. 
indices, 463. 
individual, 109. 

ing, 334. 

in our midst, 452. 
instances, 377. 

Interjections, 141-146; Horne 
Tooke on, 141; Max Muller on, 
143; Whitefield’s, 146; Shake¬ 
speare’s, 146; Greek and Latin, 
147. 

intoxicated, 116, 117. 
inveterate, 423. 
is, 466. 
island, 414. 

Italian language, 76; its debase¬ 
ment, 76-79. 
its, 430. 
it were, 447. 

J. 

jacket, 409. 

Jansenists, their disputes with the 
Jesuits, 261. 


Jeffrey, Francis, his artificial 
style, 119; anecdote of, 119. 
jeopardize, 461. 

Jerusalem artichoke, 415. 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, his grand¬ 
iose style, 156; anecdote of, 112; 
his Johnsonese dialect, 112,113; 
satirized by Dr. Wolcott, 113; 
sayings of, 123, 168; his spoken 
and written language contrast¬ 
ed, 206, 207; his advice on 
style, 215; on imitative har¬ 
mony, 255; on Mrs. Barbauld’s 
name,343; his care of his speech, 
441; improprieties in his “Ram¬ 
bler,” 442; his nickname of a 
fishwoman, 365. 

Johnson, Edward, M. D., on 
“ right,” 287. 
jolly, 375. 

Joubert,on Rousseau’s words, 10; 

his verbal economy, 183. 
jour, 247. 

K. 

Keats, John, his love of fine 
phrases, 18.' 
kennel, 402. 
kidnap, 398. 
kin, 334. 

King, T. Starr, on the mystery of 
style, 30. 
knave, 384. 

L. 

lady, 391. 

landed proprietor, 84, 273. 
Landor, W. S., on fine words, 111; 
lines from, 154. 

Language, its value to man, 2, 3, 
21; its power, 5, 6; not indis¬ 
pensable to thought and its 
expression, 19-21; elaborated 
by successive generations, 21; 
abbreviates the processes and 
preserves the results of thought, 
22, 23; its educational value, 
23; the limit of thought, 23; of 
savages, 24, 25; not the dress of 
thought, 35; unity of language 
essential to national unity, 47, 





INDEX. 


487 


48, 50; gains by time and cul¬ 
ture, 56; no new additions to, 
56; formed out of twenty ele¬ 
mentary sounds, 60; an index 
to individual character, 62-67; 
an index to national character, 
67-82; how enriched and im¬ 
poverished, 67, 68; debasement 
of the Italian, 68-70; the Greek 
and the Latin characterized, 
73-75; reveals the climate of a 
country, 75, 76; the Italian 
contrasted with the Swiss, 76; 
its influence on opinion, 83; its 
lubricity, 95; mischiefs caused 
by its debasement, 101; bar¬ 
barized by fineries of style, 122; 
of art and science, 129-131; ex¬ 
pressiveness of the English, 
132-138; transcendental, 210; 
inadequate for the expression of 
thought, 211; obscure caused 
by obscurity of thought, 214, 
215; its virtues moral, 221; its 
suggestive power, 222; Goldwin 
Smith on, 222; its magical ef¬ 
fects, 224, 225; stamped with 
local influences, 243, 244; an 
imperfect vehicle of thought, 
317; Emerson on, 369; contains 
the history of nations, 370; mir¬ 
rors the tastes, customs and 
opinions of a people, 374; of 
savages, 410-412; over-nicety 
in its use, 427; is living and or¬ 
ganic, 428; is ever growing, 
428; defies all shackles, 429; 
Henry Rogers on, 433; how to 
use it well, 440. 

Languages, of conquered peoples 
not easily extirpated, 48-50; 
the study of foreign, 50, 239. 
Lavoisier, his chemical terminolo¬ 
gy, 15. 

least, 454. 
leave, 458. 

Les Gueulx, 357. 
less, 446. 
let, 420. 

Lewes, G. H., on frankness, 158. 
lie, lay, 447. 


lieutenant, 414. 
light, 14, 302. 
like I did, 447. 
likewise, 448. 

Lincoln, Abraham, anecdote of, 
363. 

Literature, effete, 163. 

Locke, John, his “Essay on the 
Human Understanding,” 276. 
London, 312, 313. 
looks beautifully, 457. 

£. s. d., 387. 

Louis XIV, 167. 

Lower, Mark A., quoted, 329; 
anecdotes by, 330, 333; on the 
origin of certain historical 
names, 337, 338. 
lust, 385. 

Luttrell, Henry, lines by, 167. 
luxury, 295-298. 

M. 

Macaulay, T. B., on Milton’s 
words, 7, 8; on Dryden’s, 10; 
on Johnson’s language, 206; his 
eulogy on Saxon-English, 206; 
quoted, 84, 240; on disputes in 
Parliament concerning James 
II and William, 282. 

Maeready, W. C., his elocution, 
53. 

malignants, 347. 
manumit, 402. 

Marsh, Prof. G. T., on Demos¬ 
thenes, 29; on the Italian lan¬ 
guage, 69, 70; on Goethe as a 
linguist, 238. 

Martineau, James, D.D., on 
words, 103. 
martinet, 409. 

Materialism, derives no support 
from language, 288, 289. 
maudlin, 408. 
megrim, 419. 
menial, 382. 

Methodist, 355. 

Mezzofanti, Cardinal, 177, 178. 
Michaelis, J. D., remarks of, 79. 
Mill, J. S., on the misuse of cer¬ 
tain words, 273. 

Miller, Hugh, his style, 238. 



488 


INDEX. 


Milton, the suggestiveness of his 
verse, 7, 8; Macaulay on his 
words, 7, 8; his versification, 9; 
his necromantic power over lan¬ 
guage, 9; his use of monosylla¬ 
bles, 151; his use of words in 
their etymological sense, 233, 
375, 376; his prose style, 241; 
extracts from his “Paradise 
Lost,” 250, 251, 252, 254; from 
“II Penseroso” and “L’Al¬ 
legro,” 253. 

Mirabeau, his words, 3. 
miscreant, 380. 
mistaken, 421. 
money, 259. 
mongrel, 405. 
monomania, 94. 

Monosyllables, their potency in 
life and literature, 140; how 
constructed in English, 148; 
their number in English, 156. 
Montaigne, on verbal definitions 
and explanations, 310. 
Montgomery, James, on Milton’s 
versification, 8, 9. 

Moon-Alford controversy, the, 
424. 

Moore, Thomas, anecdote of, 27; 

verses of, 153; saying of, 240. 
more perfect, 465. 

Morris, Gouverneur, anecdote by, 
87, 88. 

Motley, J. L., on “The Beggars,” 
357. 

mountebank, 388. 

Muller, Max, on “ The Supernat¬ 
ural,” and “To Know and To 
Believe,” 264; on etymology, 
413. 

murder, 303, 304. 
muriatic acid, 293. 
musket, 232, 248. 
mussulmen, 469. 
mutual, 462. 
myself, 458. 
mystery, 406. 

N. 

Names, of children, 323-325, 343, 
344; of things, once names of 


persons, 408; of places — how 
corrupted, 417, 418. 

Names of Men, 323-344; how 
regarded by the Jews and the 
Romans, 43, 45; their sugges¬ 
tiveness, 325; all originally sig¬ 
nificant, 326; Roman, 327; 
surnames, 328; Saxon, 334; 
obsolete words preserved in, 
332; ending in er, 332; ending 
in ivard, 332; derived from of¬ 
fices, 332; disguised, denoting 
mean occupations, 333; from 
personal qualities, 334; Puri¬ 
tan, 334; derived from oaths, 
334; indicating personal blem¬ 
ishes or moral obliquities, 335, 
336; some changes of, 336, 
339; “ Erasmus” and “ Melan- 
chthon,” 336; corruption of, 
336,337; queer conjunctions of, 
339; that harmonize with, or 
are antagonistic to, their own¬ 
ers’ occupations, 339-341; puns 
upon, 341-343; not mere labels, 
346; Goethe on, 346; their influ¬ 
ence on their wearers, 346. 
Napier, extract from his History 
of the Peninsular War, 201. 
Napoleon, his love of glory, 64, 
65; his hypocrisy, 168; his style, 
222; on epithets, 350. 
naturalist, 378. 
nature and art, 298. 
nature and law of nature, 269,270. 
nervous, 420. 
never, 453. 

Newman, Prof. J. H., verses by, 
174. 

nice, 394, 461. 

Nicknames, 345-366; their influ¬ 
ence in controversy, 346; Goe¬ 
the on, 346, 348; of Van Buren, 
Tyler, Gen. Scott and Bona¬ 
parte, 348, 349; why effective, 

350. 351; theological, 351; 
loving, 351; Cobbett’s skill in, 

351, 352; Carlyle’s, 352; mean¬ 
ingless, 352; their origin, 352- 
354; felicitous, 354; fondness 
of the Italians for them, 354, 




INDEX. 


489 


359; memorable English, 360- 
363; originally complimentary, 
363; Southey’s “Doctor Dove” 
on, 364. 
no, 455. 
none, 457. 

notwithstanding, 470. 
numerous, 470. 

O. 

ocJc , 334. 

O’Connell, Daniel, his “Lax 
Weir” case, 16; his stock 
phrases, 168. 
off of, 465. 
oh! 142. 
old, 280. 
older, 468. 

O, Mac, and Ap, 328, 329, 330. 
Onomatopes, 242-256; objections 
to the theory of, 245-247; why 
they vary in different languages, 
246; their expressiveness, 248, 
255; abound in poetry, 248; ex¬ 
amples of in English poetry, 
249-254; Homer’s, Virgil’s and 
Aristophanes’s, 254; Dr. John¬ 
son on, 255; no rules for their 
choice, 255. 
on to, 467. 

opposite and contrary, 284. 
or, 285. 

Oratory, an important law of, 190. 

originality, 290. 

ostracize. 371. 

ovation, 117. 

overflow, 468. 

owl, 399. 

oxygen, 293. 

P. 

pagan, 371, 372. 
palace, 405. 
palfrey, 405. 
palsy, 419. 

Pambos, anecdote of, 174. 
pander, 409. 
pantaloon, 398. 
pantheist, 276. 
paradise, 382. 
paraphernalia, 464. 


parasite, 399. 
parliament, 272. 
parlor, 400. 
parson, 385. 
partake, 437. 
parts, 380. 
party, 451. 

Pascal, quoted, 111. 
pasquinade, 409. 

Patkul, and Charles XII. 

pensive, 394. 

people, 465. 

person, 283, 397. 

personalty, 467. 

pet, 396. 

petrels, 396. 

Phidias, saying of, 223. 
Philologists, their dangers, 412. 
Phillips, his “World of Words,” 
429. 

Pinkney, William, his study of 
words, 17,18. 

Pitt, Christopher, lines by, 250. 
plagiarism, 400. 

Plantagenet, 338. 
plenty, 445. 

Poetry, English, of the 18th cen¬ 
tury, 163-165. 
policy, 414. 

Political economists, their dis¬ 
putes, 259, 260. 
poltroon, 392. 
pontiff, 406. 

Pope, Alexander, his translation 
of Homer, 35, 36; saying of, 
53; his use of small words, 139; 
his circumlocutions, 165; lines 
from, 249, 252. 

Popes, their management of theo¬ 
logical controversies, 263. 
porpoise, 416. 
post, 420. 

Practical men, and theorists, 305, 
307. 

Preachers, their use of philosophi¬ 
cal words, 109, 110. 
predicate, 451. 
premier, 358. 
prevent, 378. 
preventative, 461. 
previous, 445. 





490 


INDEX, 


priest, 263. 

Proctor, Adelaide, on words, 
2, 104. 

property, 390. 
proposition, 455. 
proven, 455. 
punctual, 379. 
puny, 407. 

Puritan, 359. 

Q. 

quaker, 359. 
quandary, 388. 
quantity, 458. 
quamquam, 289. 
quinsy, 419. 

Quirites, 85. 
quite, 457. 
quiz, 393. 

R. 

raising the rent, 471. 
rascal, 378. 
raven, 398. 
reasons, 97. 
recommend, 446. 
regeneration, 382. 
relevant, 381. 
rendition, 463. 
resent, 384. 
restive, 458. 
retaliate, 384, 423. 
revolt, 448. 
rhinoceros, 320. 
right, 287, 310, 398. 
ringleader, 232. 
rip, 422. 

Robertson, Rev. F. W., on cal¬ 
umny, 91, 92; on talk without 
deeds, 173; on the use of su¬ 
perlatives, 174, 175. 191, 192. 
Robinson, “Bootjack,” 360. 
rodomontade, 410. 

Romanic words in English, 197— 

201 . 

Romans, the, degeneracy of their 
language, 75; their ideas of 
virtue and vice, 81; had no 
idea of sin, 81. 

Roscius, the Roman actor, 19. 
rosemary, 415. 


Rossini, saying of, 176. 
rostrum, 405. 

Roundhead, 360. 

Rump, the, 360. 

S. 

sagacious, 378. 

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., on Napo¬ 
leon’s style, 222. 
salary, 398. 
salmon, 405. 

Salutation, its forms an index to 
national character, 77-79. 
same, 290. 
sandwich, 409. 
sarcasm, 399. 
saunterer, 409. 

Savages, no ethical nomenclatures 
in their languages, 80; their 
poverty of language, 24, 25. 
Saxon-English, its merits and 
defects, 196-197, 201-208; the 
basis of the language, 208; its 
witchery, 208; its obsolete pic¬ 
torial words, 201; Robert Hall 
on, 205; Macaulay on, 206; its 
freedom from equivocation, 
278. 

Saxon Words, or Romanic? 194- 
209. 

scarcely, 468. 

Scarlett, Sir James, on brevity in 
jury addresses, 182. 

Schiller, on the study of foreign 
languages, 239. 

Scholarship, the errot of modern, 
178. 

schooner, 399, 400. 

Science, influence of its names 
and phrases, 89, 
scrupulous, 400. 
second causes, 270. 
secret, 376. 

Secret of Apt Words, the, 210— 
241. 

Selden, John, saying of, 56. 
seldom, or never, 454. 
selfishness, 81, 279. 

Seneca, his moral discourses, 
169; his wealth, 169, 170; his 
crimes, 170. 



INDEX. 


491 


seraphim, 4G5. 
servant, 400. 
servitude, 274. 
setting-room, 464. 
sexton, 388. 
shacklebone, 372. 

Shakespeare, his words, 7; sug¬ 
gestiveness of his diction, 54, 
55; not a classical scholar, 
235; quoted, 254. 
shall, will, 471-477. 

Sharp, Dr., saying of, 173. 
Shenstone, on melody of style, 
255. 

Shibboleths, their influence with 
the people, 87-89. 
shoot, 416. 

Siddons, Mrs., on one of Hay- 
don’s pictures, 85. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, on the ballad 
of “Chevy Chase,” 224; saving 
of, 441. “ 

signing one’s name, 404. 
silhouettes, 408. 
silly, 382. 
simple, 385. 
simplicity, 299. 
sincere, 367. 
sit, sat, 454. 
slave, 400. 

Small Words, 139-157; when 
necessary, 156; their potency, 
140; abound in English, 147. 
Smith, 331. 

Smith, Prof. Gold win, on lan¬ 
guage, 222. 

Smith, Sydney, saying of, 26; his 
word-coinings, 433; on Sir 
James Macintosh’s style, 118, 
119; his solecisms, 442. 
snob, 395. 

Solecisms, in eminent writers, 
434, 437, 438, 442-444. 
solidarity, 430. 

Some Abuses of Words, 177-193. 
somerset, 417. 
son, 327, 333. 
sophist, 271. 

South, Robert, D.D.. on verbal 
magic, 94, 275; extract from, 

184. 


Spaniards, their love for long 
names, 127, 128, 339. 
“Spasmodic School” of Poetry, 
362. 

specialty, 461. 
species, *300. 
speculation, 383. 
spencer, 409. 

Spencer, Herbert, on Saxon-En- 
glish, 154. 

Spenser, his “Abode of Sleep,” 
249. 

spoonsful, 468. 

Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., on relig¬ 
ious cant, 172. 
squatter, 430. 
squirrel, 399. 

Stanhope, Lady Hester, 319. 
Stanley, Lord, on Saxon words, 
194, 195. 
starvation, 360. 
stentorian, 410. 
stipulation, 387. 
stopping, 462. 

Story, Judge Joseph, anecdote 
told by, 312. 

Story, W. W., quoted, 199. 
stranger, 403. 
strong, 302. 

Style, the most vital element of 
iiterary immortality, 30; Gib¬ 
bon’s and Hume’s, 30; Starr 
King on its mystery, 30; an 
index to character, (55; intens¬ 
ity of 192; the transcendental, 
2i0; how to form a good, 215, 
216, 222, 225; no model, 217; 
varieties of, 219; Joubert on, 
220, 221: the kind demanded 
to-day, 220; not to be culti¬ 
vated.' for its own sake, 221; 
images the writer’s nature, 
221; Ruskin on, 221; a question 
concerning it, 224; perspicuity 
its first law, 225; should be 
vivid, 225. 
succeed, 469. 
succession powder, 96. 
such, 456. 
su if rage, 406. 
sunstroke, 293. 



492 


INDEX 


supercilious, 400. 
superior, 457. 
supplement, 456. 
surname, 415. 

Swinburne, A. C., his command 
of words, 11. 
sycophant, 399. 

Synonyms, 26. 

T. 

tabby, 399. 
tale, 375. 

Tartar, 469. 
tawdry, 409. 

Taylor, “ Chicken,” 362. 

Taylor, Henry, on the writers of 
the 17th century, 13-14. 

Taylor, J eremy, his latinistic 
style, 233. 
team, 313-316. 
telescope, 430. 
tend, 276. 

Tennyson, his command of 
words, 11; his use of onomato¬ 
poeia, 251, 252; on words, 212. 
terrier, 405. 
that of, 470. 
the above, 450. 
the church, 262, 263. 
the masses, 452. 
theory, 305. 
then, 450. 

Theological disputes, 260-264. 
thing, 380. 

Thomson, James, his list of ob¬ 
solete words, 57. 

Thought, difficulty of expressing 
it, 211. 

thrall, thraldom, 403. 
tidy, 379. 
toad-eater, 389. 
to a degree, 456. 
to allude, 459, 460. 
to curry favor, 418. 
to extremely maltreat, 467. 
Tooke, Horne, on “truth,” 286, 
287. 

topsy-turvy, 388. 

Tory, 355. 

Townsend, Lady, on Whitefield, 
173. 


Translations, their inadequacy, 

31- 43; of the New Testament, 

32- 34; of the “ Iliad ” and the 
“ Odyssey,” 336; of Horace, 
38; blunders in, 39-41. 

transpire, 470. 
treacle, 419. 
tribulation, 399. 
trifling minutiae, 462. 
trivial, 392. 

True Blue, 407. 
truth, 286, 289. 
try, 451. 
try and, 469. 
two good ones, 471. 
tyrant, 271. 

U. 

ugly, 466. 
underhanded, 461. 
unity, 283. 
upon, 14. 

Usage, a presumptive test of pur¬ 
ity of speech, 434; of old writ¬ 
ers, 435. 
usury, 380. 
utopian, 88, 410. 

V. 

vagabond, 384. 
ventilate, 470. 
villain, 382. 

violation of nature. 267. 

Virgil, his ‘UEneid,” 28; his ono¬ 
matopoeia, 254. 
virtual representation, 265. 
Vocabularies, of different men 
and callings, 66, 67. 

Vocal Organs, the, their adapta¬ 
tion to the atmosphere, 60. 
volcano, 409. 

W. 

Walton, Izaak, his style, 236. 
was, 471. 

watched him do it, 457. 
we, 161, 162. 
wealth, 390. 
wearies, 446. 

Webster, Daniel, his study of 
words, 17; the impressiveness 




INDEX. 


493 


of his words, 52; his early 
speeches bombastic, 124; his 
use of plain words, 124; his 
temperance of language, 192. 
Wellington, on his ‘“duty,” 64. 
Whately, Archbishop, his sim¬ 
plicity in preaching, 123. 
whether, 453. 

Whipple, E. P., on the words of 
Chaucer, Edwards, and Barrow, 
54; on the suggestiveness of 
Shakespeare’s diction, 54, 55; 
on the styles of Sydney Smith, j 
Bacon, Locke, etc., 219, 220; j 
his style, 237; his knowledge of 
English literature, 237. 
Whitney, W. D., quoted, 234. 
Whittington and his cat, 417. 
whole, entire, complete, total, 
460, 469. 

William, 326. 

Willmott, Rev. Robert A., on 
Dryden’s and Pope’s versifica¬ 
tion, 253. 
window, 404. 
wiseacre, 414. 
wit, 380. 

Wolcott, Dr., his lines on John¬ 
son, 113. 
woman, 391. 

women, their language, 240. 
Words, their significance, 1-61; 
their range and power, 2, 46; 
are things, 3; Mirabeau on, 3; 
Hazlitt on, 3; more’enduring 
than sculpture or painting, 4, 

5; Homer’s, 5; the incarnation 
of thought, 6; Milton’s, 7-9; 
Montgomery on Milton’s, 8, 9; 
Bacon’s, 10; Dryden’s, 10; Mon¬ 
taigne’s, 10; Rousseau’s, 10; 
Coleridge’s. 10; Tennyson’s, 11; 
Swinburne’s, 11; De Quincey’s 
mastery of them, 12; of the 
17th century writers, i3; diffi¬ 
culty of defining, 14—16; Daniel 
Webster’s study of, 17; Lord 
Chatham’s study of, 17; Will¬ 
iam Pinkney’s study of, 17; 
Theophile Gautier’s fondness 
for picturesque, 19; comprehen¬ 


sive, 23; their use a test of 
culture, 25, 26; should fit close 
to the thought, 26; never strict¬ 
ly synonymous, 26 ; Wm. Pitt’s 
use of, 96; Robert Hall’s use 
of, 26; John Foster’s scrutiny 
of, 27; Thomas Moore’s use of, 
27; how used by the ancient 
writers, 27-30; Demosthenes’s 
choice of, 28, 29; Cicero’s use 
of, 29; Cowper on, 34; their 
necromantic power, 34, 35; how 
regarded by the ancients, 43- 
45; use of in ‘‘the black art,” 
45; T. W. Higginson on, 46; 
Prof. Maurice on, 46; Haw¬ 
thorne on their spells, 47; their 
meaning and force depend up¬ 
on the man who uses them, 50- 
56; E. P. Whipple on the trans¬ 
figuration of common, 54; sug¬ 
gestiveness of Shakespeare’s, 54, 
55; media for the emission of 
character, 55, 56; no new ones 
can be invented, 56, 57; diffi¬ 
culty of restoring obsolete, 57; 
their significance disclosed by 
life, 59, 60; their morality, 62- 
104; an index to character, 62- 
104; their power over the pop¬ 
ular imagination, 82; test of 
thought, 82; embalm mistaken 
opinions, 84; Bacon on their 
power, 84; Balzac on their 
witchery, 85; South on the en¬ 
chantment of popular ones, 
85, 86, 87; illustrations of their 
power, 86, 87: their influence 
in theology, 88, 89; their influ¬ 
ence in science, 89; their influ¬ 
ence upon authors, 90; em¬ 
ployed as expletives, 90; calum¬ 
nious, 92 ; their power in politics, 
93; Bulwer on their influence, 
93; their perversions by the 
Greeks and Romans, 96; used 
to gloss over vices, 99, 100; 
auctioneers’ use of, 100; crimi¬ 
nality of their corruptors, 101, 
102; James Martineau on, 103; 
a startling fact about them, 








494 


INDEX. 


104; grand, 105-138; the mania 
for big, 106-108; St. Paul on, 
109; the simplest best, 124; the 
affectation of foreign, 125,126; 
uncouthness of scientific, 130, 
131; small, 139-157; conven¬ 
tional, 158, 160, 172; used with¬ 
out meaning, 162-176; lose their 
significance by handling, 170, 
171. 190; some abuses of, 177- 
193; the secret of apt, 210-241; 
only symbols, 213; their ar¬ 
rangement on the battle-fields 
of thought, 226, 228; onomato- 
poetie, 242-256; phonetic cor¬ 
ruption of, 247; fallacies in, 
257-322; effect of equivocal in 
theology, 257-264; and in phil¬ 
osophy, 264; their changes of 
meaning, 271; dictionary defi¬ 
nitions of, 275; “ rabble-charm¬ 
ing,” 275; question-begging, 
279; derivative and primitive, 
280; mere hieroglyphics, 288; 
shadow forth more than they 
express, 289; their insinuations 
of error, 292; in legal instru¬ 
ments, 311; their ambiguity in 
statutes, 311, 312; express only 
the relations of things, 317; im¬ 
perfect signs of our conceptions, 
317, 318, 321; convey different 


ideas to different minds, 318, 
319, 320; denote but part of an 
object, 320; their power in the 
French revolution, 349, 350; 
fascination of their study, 367, 
368; concentrated poems, 369; 
knowledge embodied in, 371; 
Arab in English, 371; changes 
in their meaning, 374-382; their 
degradation, 382-397; common 
with curious derivations, 387- 
412; of illusive etymology, 412- 
420; causes of their corruption, 
412: Anglicizing of foreign, 
412; their contradictory mean¬ 
ings, 420-423; origin of new, 
428; legitimate once denounced, 
429; coined by poets, 432; ad¬ 
vantages of their accurate use, 
436-440; the use of pet, 444; 
the coining of, 425, 432-434. 

Words without meaning, 158-176. 

Wordsworth, lines from, 251. 

Wotton, Sir Henry, his definition 
of an ambassador, 166. 

Y. 

Youth and Age, Coleridge’s lines 
on, 256. 

Z. 

zero, 419. 




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